Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature 0199498725, 9780199498727

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Inlays of Subjectivity

Inlays of Subjectivity Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature

Nikhil Govind

1

1 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries. Published in India by Oxford University Press 22 Workspace, 2nd Floor, 1/22 Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi 110 002 © Oxford University Press, 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted. First Edition published in 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. ISBN-13 (print edition): 978-0-19-949872-7 ISBN-10 (print edition): 0-19-949872-5 ISBN-13 (eBook): 978-0-19-909834-7 ISBN-10 (eBook): 0-19-909834-4

Typeset in Adobe Garamond Pro 11/15.5 by Tranistics Data Technologies, Kolkata 700 091 Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd

Note from the Author

All non-English words have been italicized, with the English translations provided immediately afterwards in brackets. This is a book that depends heavily on translations, and literary works are referred to in the book by their translated titles—all further details of publication are listed in the Bibliography. I would like to take this opportunity to underline my particular debt to translators. Few professions in India studies are more urgent and so deeply integral to the evolution and expansion of our thought and polity.

Acknowledgements

I am fortunate to live in one of the most beautiful coastline ecologies of the world, so I would like to thank the landscape that I find myself in. There is a rich and long cultural history here, and an even older pre-human history, which I like to think has altered me in some way. Thanks to the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) for encouraging a unique institution—the Manipal Centre for Humanities—to flower. Sundar Sarukkai set up this magnificent campus by the lake and brought many intellectual voices as mentors to the centre—Gopal Guru, A. Raghuramaraju, K. V. Akshara. Being a part of this venture helped me understand something of the regional richness of the Udupi area, with its proud tradition of writers such as Shivarama Karanth and Vaidehi, visual artists such as K. K. Hebbar, and performing arts such as Yakshagana. We have been visited by several scholars and writers who stirred fascinating discussions on topics that are of relevance to this book—on the contemporary novel, on Dalit literature, and on nationalism and the regional. Vice Chancellor Dr Vinod Bhat has been a rare and erudite champion of the Humanities and has supported many endeavours

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here. I would like to thank my many fine colleagues, each of whom showcase the diversity of our interests—Meera Baindur on the environment, Mrinal Kaul on Sanskrit aesthetics, Nirmalya Guha on Indian philosophy, Anubhav Sengupta on political sociology, Jagriti Gangopadhyay on medical sociology, and Mohammed Shafeeq on visual culture. I would like to thank my students, all the way from the undergraduate to the doctoral level. To teach is to learn again, to understand anew, and each generation of students has helped me apprehend my concerns just that little bit deeper. I have many of your faces in front of me now, and feel reassured that a new generation of critical Indian scholarship is slowly but surely being trained. I have been fortunate to present part of my study of Agyeya’s Shekhar at Yale. A short section of my work on Krishna Sobti’s Sunflowers in the Dark was presented in Trivandrum and published in the journal Samyukta (16 [1]: 90–103.). Likewise, some of the writing on Srikanta appeared in Inter-Asian Travel, edited by Gautam Chakravarty (2019). Both excerpts have been substantially rewritten and re-contextualized for this volume. I have had the extraordinary good fortune of meeting many of the writers I write about, even if I met them only after having written about them. It was extraordinary to hear the sound of their furious keyboards only a thin wall away. I must particularly mention K. R. Meera and Perumal Murugan. I hope something of what I write measures up to the power of their word. A brief correspondence with Urmila Pawar was inspiring, and I am grateful I got to hear her speak at a public event. I would like to specially thank the many translators without whom this book would simply not have been possible. Few arts have been less appreciated. There will be no India without conscientious translators. Over the last decades, few acts of citizenship have been more worthy, or more necessary, than trying to bring the power of

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Indian literature not only to the world but also to the many language and literary entities within India. I would like to thank the team at Oxford University Press, India, for shepherding this book. I wish to thank Geetha Prabhu, Greeshma Patel, Chirayu Patel, Arushi Patel, and Advay Patel for providing joy and laughter when most needed. I am especially grateful to my mother, Raji, for taking a keen and loving interest in whatever I have attempted, and to my father, Govind, for his quiet but calm and persistent support. The scholarship of my brother, Rahul Govind, has always been an exemplar of theory rigorously applied to our everyday political world, and continues to inspire and orient my work. The historian Sanghamitra Misra, my sister-in-law, has taught me much on how to read the voice of protest in its most expansive dimension. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, the literary scholar, novelist, and memoirist, Gayathri Prabhu. This has not been an easy book to write. I have learned more from you, and in more ways, than would likely realize. Let me say it here—as you did not allow me to add your name on the cover—that this book is as much yours as mine, in structure and content, in imagination and language and idea. I dedicate it here to you. Udupi, Karnataka, 2019

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Interiority is the very possibility of a birth and death that do not derive their meaning from history. Interiority institutes an order different from historical time in which totality is constituted, an order where everything is pending, where what is no longer possible historically remains always possible. … The inner life is the unique way for the real to exist as a plurality. —Levinas (1969 [1961], 55–8; italics in original) Literature is a vast laboratory in which we experiment with estimations, evaluations, and judgments of approval and condemnation through which narrativity serves as a propaedeutic to ethics … this double gaze, looking backward in the direction of the practical field and ahead in the direction of the ethical field. —Ricoeur (1992 [1990], 115)

In one of India’s archetypal autobiographical fragments— Waiting for a Visa (1935–6)—B. R. Ambedkar, the principal mind behind the Indian Constitution, writes of his experience being a member of a government committee charged with investigating

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grievances against untouchables. As he goes to one of the villages, Chalisgaon, where he has to investigate allegations of prejudice, he has a peculiar experience in a tonga (horse-carriage)—for at the end of the ride, he finds himself fallen into a river. Ambedkar writes: So heavy was the fall that I lay down [there] senseless. The Maharwada [untouchable colony] is just on the other bank of the river. The men who had come to greet me at the station had reached there ahead of me. I was lifted and taken to the Maharwada amidst the cries and lamentations of the men, women, and children. As a result of this, I received several injuries. My leg was fractured, and I was disabled for several days. I could not understand how all this had happened. (Ambedkar 2014a [1993], 680)

He realizes that the reason for all this was that none of the regular tongawalas (drivers of the one-horse carriage) wanted to drive with an untouchable on board, and hence one of the untouchables in the village, someone who had no experience with a tonga, had volunteered. Ambedkar continues his account, not without humour and sadness: The man took the reins in his hand and started, thinking there was nothing in it. But as he got on, he felt his responsibility and became so nervous that he gave up all attempt to control. To save my dignity, the Mahars of Chalisgaon had put my very life in jeopardy. It is then I learnt that a Hindu tongawalla, no better than a menial, has a dignity by which he can look upon himself as a person who is superior to any untouchable, even though he may be a barrister-at-law. (Ambedkar 2014a [1993], 680–1)

Being inexperienced as a tonga driver, the amateur driver ended up having himself, Ambedkar, and the tonga fall into the river. Ambedkar does not tell us of how his investigations proceeded in that village, for the incident of his (and his driver’s) humiliation in the river encapsulates how insidious the problem of social inequity

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was—the wide gap between lived experience and the lofty, platonic world of law and committee work that he had come to the village for. There is the well-outfitted bureaucrat with his briefcase, and then there is the muddy river of reality. The autobiography glides on to a later incident, choosing not to dwell further on this syndrome of humiliation. This tone of distance and detachment, even when talking of something personal and complex (Ambedkar’s title for the section is ‘Pride, Awkwardness and a Dangerous Accident at Chalisgaon’), is something that will haunt many later Dalit memoirs. In these memoirs, it often seems that personhood is melted—on the one hand, this melting of individuation might result in a detached, chosen subjugation of personal identity to a larger caste-solidarity, but on the other hand, there is a sense of the awkward, even ridiculous, body in a river looking up at his community’s equally helpless lamentation. Neither language nor law nor institutions could quite capture that quintessence of chagrin and absurdity that Ambedkar must have felt. Experience, not least in its bathetic dimension, captures in an irreducible manner the wound of injustice that cuts one open, making one lose one’s moorings and sense of a coherent, regular world in which moral action and thought matter and are effective. This book concerns itself with these densities of subjectivity as it navigates the world—the emotional and cognitive content that is often born from the ludicrous and tragic inadequacy of abstract, even if well-meant, solutions. Ambedkar, in Chalisgaon, is already addressing the issue of untouchability from a high level—he is a senior governmental official. It is accepted in powerful circles that the problem needs to be rooted out. Yet, on the ground, there is an obduracy (and perhaps incomprehension and indifference) to governmental efforts at social justice. There is a wide gap between intent (however powerful and conscientious) and everyday mulish reality. Perhaps the higher castes directly intended that particular humiliation, but it may also be that

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their actions only played out an inner, spontaneous, everyday script of humiliation that was not particularly directed at Ambedkar or the norms of justice. In the previous section of his memoir-fragment, Ambedkar had described a similar humiliation where a dozen Parsis armed with sticks lined [up] before me in a menacing mood, and myself standing before them with a terrified look imploring for mercy, is a scene which so long a period as eighteen years has not succeeded in fading away. I can even now vividly recall it—and [I] never recall it without tears in my eyes. It was then for the first time that I learnt that a person who is an untouchable to a Hindu is also an untouchable to a Parsi. (Ambedkar 2014a [1993], 678)

Untouchability thereby traverses all axes: region, caste, religion, and social status. This book is interested in these breaches: as one inhabits a world, one is conscious of pain and oppressiveness, even as one might be conscious of the moral efforts underway to combat that oppression. But the undoing of injustice is never quite fully achieved. There is a doubleness to Ambedkar’s voice—an optimistic belief in the power of official ethical action (he is a committee-member), but also a sense of the overwhelming nature of social evil and injustice in the world. One would not want to move too quickly from the ‘tears in my eyes’, to the bromides of faith in a polity’s future, the mandates of a Constitution the promise of which keeps receding into the future with every step one takes toward it. Yet, Ambedkar would not want to dwell forever in those tears either—sometimes, it is the tears that seem fleeting, and sometimes, it is the belief in an egalitarian future that seems tentative. It is by paying attention to these complexities in the memoir that a commentator today may note how voice, emotion, and norm enhance each other and give a fuller picture of the situation. This is what gives the autobiography its evocativeness, meaning,

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and robustness. However much abstraction spirals, it must not lose its home in the felt pain of a psyche at a given personal and historical moment. Humiliation, as described above, is one of the foremost enunciations of that pain of injustice. Recent scholarship has rightfully picked this trait for special attention—the many essays in the book Humiliation: Claims and Context (2009), edited by the distinguished political scientist Gopal Guru, are examples of this engagement. For in that village of Chalisgaon, as in many later times of his life, Ambedkar felt isolated, alone, helpless, wondering if his many years of service and persuasion would ever amount to anything concrete. There had been a long prior life of living on the margins of a larger dominant society. It is no surprise that he insisted that the critical idiom through which democracy should play out in the Constitution was this notion of unjust, unconscionable suffering. The first-person experience of Ambedkar is linked to the more abstracted rights-, representation-, and protection-based discourse of disadvantaged groups preserving themselves against a self-perpetuating elite that seeks to stamp out individuated diversity. One cannot thus avoid the question of how these experiences of first-person selfhood relate to the thirdperson regulatory abstractions of the minority and human rights that are foundational to Ambedkar’s vision of the Constitution. Human rights of disadvantaged minorities is hardly a transparent concept, and it had a long and vexed history through the Indian twentieth century before it came to complicate the Constitution itself (Jha 2009; Bajpai 2009). Are all minorities alike in their minority-ness and difference—is there such a thing as a single, universal suffering, of which all forms of suffering and injustice are only subtypes? The debate on minorities is an opening into a broader ethics of self-presentation in the world, when a dominant majoritarian tilt would rather have the speaker silenced, or speak in a familiar, cooptable idiom of simple victimhood. But a thoughtful enunciation

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of suffering, irreducible to mute victimhood, brings in its trail many of the questions of this book: of how suffering or injustice can be shared, listened and responded to, and recognized in its fullness, individuality, power, and vulnerability. One can achieve a quick grasp of the dimensions of the problem if one looks at a small slice of the debates in the constitutional assembly in which Ambedkar participated. These debates showcase some of the difficulties one meets with when one seeks to bring abstract moral norms down to the notion of individuated suffering that the subjective voice reveals in its full range and power. The Constitution is not a cold idiom of justice, for just below the surface there linger many urgent concerns of survival—education, language, livelihood, migrancy, and so on. This is after all the time of the viciousness of the violence of Partition that was taking place, even as the members of the constituent assembly were debating these questions in Delhi. Three examples of the constitutional debate demonstrate how a large part of the complexity of the concept of ‘sufferer-minority’ is entangled in other equally elusive concepts. Here is the first example: while answering the question of a Professor Shiban Lal Saksena, Ambedkar discusses the difficulties of understanding the needs of vulnerable minorities. Amendment no. 714 ‘raises the question whether a minority should not have the Fundamental Right embodied in the Constitution for receiving education in the primary stage in the mother tongue’ (Ambedkar 2014b, 429). Learning in their mother tongue is assumed by all to be the most suited for the development of a child—but, as everyone in the debate wonders, is this simply an ideal to be achieved over time when the resources are available, or is it a fundamental right that has to be acted on immediately because language, culture, and children are of the essence of a vulnerable community? There are variable sets of relations, each full of its own inner complexity—culture, right, education, and mother tongue.

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They remain heated questions up to the very present—the Tamil child in Karnataka may prefer to learn English or Tamil to Kannada (Mishra and Sridhar 2016). Ambedkar clarifies to Saksena that the word ‘minority’ (in the technical sense of ‘political safeguards such as representation in the legislature, representation in the services’) also sometimes needs to be expanded to include non-technical minorities, that is, those who are minorities in a ‘cultural and linguistic sense’ (430). This notion, to him, includes those from Madras who are settled in Bombay. Ambedkar insisted on the need to protect this more expanded sense of minority, as he rightly saw a future of many internal migrations, as well as the possibility of these migrants returning to their original region. He also made it clear that he did not want any financial or other obligation to be felt on the part of the state in Bombay toward these migrants, including that of education in the mother tongue. At a later point in the debate, there is a further question of whether Muslims and Christians were indeed a minority of the same order as Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes, and that perhaps only the latter were entitled to the two privileges of being a technical minority—representation in the legislature and in the services (854). One might recall that in Waiting for a Visa, the very structure of the narrative highlighted that the untouchables were untouchables not only to caste Hindus but also to Parsis and Muslims. This continual veiling (the high-risk ‘impersonations’ and caste-passing in Waiting for a Visa) and unveiling of humiliation is central to Ambedkar’s narrative. There is perhaps no equalizing, a shared sense of minority-ism, for to be a minority is less a number and naming than the experience of having to suffer wilful and continual humiliation (Baxi 2009; Nandy 2009). There is the inherent risk in a democracy that majoritarianism will keep generating not just more minorities but ever more types of minorities (for example, not just the older axes of religion and caste but newer axes of sexuality, mental health,

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survivors of ecological catastrophes, and so on) and thus, ever more types of humiliations. To return to the second example from the constitutional debates: Congress leaders Sardar Vallabhai Patel and Kanaiyalal Maneklal Munshi wanted a law against conversion, or at least one against conversion for a minor—one may note that ‘minor’ (that is, someone under eighteen) is the original root-word of minority. Ambedkar is against this amendment, bringing up practical questions such as orphans (a very real problem during that time of Partition). What needs to be noted is the implication of agency and self as it mediates law on the one hand (rights-discourse) and, on the other hand, the other threads of selfhood that are easily commingled in these questions of conversion and historical events—public power and speech, volatile religious faith, age, commitment to regions and languages learnt or foresworn, risky and immigrant livelihood, and homelessness. Partition, as doppelganger, may still serve as the paradigmatic homelessness that the underside of nationalism often entails (Jain and Sarin 2018). The third and final example from the Constitutional Debates of the complexity and miscibility of the concept of suffering or disprivileged minority: there were four subcommittees under the overall Advisory Committee for the Constitution—one on Fundamental Rights, another on Minorities, a third on North-East Frontier Tribal Areas, and a fourth called ‘Excluded and Partially Excluded Areas (other than those in Assam) Subcommittee’ (25). This ‘order of things’—the relation of different axes of geography and religion— demonstrates how difficult it was to come up with a unified notion of the neglected or discriminated minority. The language used was the ‘protection’ of minorities, and the draft Constitution did not seem to question this mode of trust in the eternal paternalism of a benign state. Seventy years on, this relation of the state as being, often to a ludicrous effect, both carrot and stick to the disadvantaged still

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animates strong cultural expression. The short stories of the Adivasi doctor Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar demonstrate the fantasy landscape of this relation—the title story of his collection The Adivasi Will Not Dance is about the demand that a dance troupe perform for the president. Far from being a congenial, egalitarian-tending exchange of cultures between mainstream and margin, there is instead the revelation of the true teeth of power—the troupe members are implicated on false charges of murder and then beaten up. All this for refusing to tamely showcase their ‘culture’ to the authorities (Shekhar 2017). Below is a more extended exemplification, a prison account written over six decades after the Constitution was drafted, which shows how far this idealized paternalism is from the reality of the experiences of many citizens. Inset 1: Prison as a Country Prisoner No. 100: An Account of My Nights and Days in an Indian Prison is an account of the five-year jail term served by Kashmiri activist Anjum Habib (2011). Anjum Habib was a young political activist from Kashmir, strongly contesting the male domination of the Kashmiri elite’s quarrels with the Indian state regarding devolution of power. Abruptly one day, in the early years of this century, she was arrested in Delhi and jailed under a draconian legislation that has since been rescinded. This gives a particular touch of surrealism to her experiences and the memory-making that her account is (as Habib uses the word ‘Account’ in the title of the book, this book too will call it an account rather than a memoir or autobiography). Contact with her peers and family was suddenly rendered uncertain. She was released after five years in prison (2003–7). Her account is a testament to how the country’s hastily improvised laws (especially on security issues) can first create and then nullify whole worlds of human suffering, especially as

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one moves away from the power centres of Delhi and metropolitan India. Exposing the lie of a uniform, homogenous citizenship, it is simply accepted that different laws apply in those parts of the country (especially Kashmir and the North-East) that are seen as particularly restive or inflammable. The account vividly portrays the isolation that years of prison engender, an isolation that seems to entirely re-shape the subject. One is put in jail for a political cause and is punished not merely by confinement but by the proliferating, enigmatic, minute regulations within that enclosed space. The void of the prison generates its own culture. This prison culture is an amalgam of (a) the state turning a blind eye to indiscretions (again, both due to inefficiency as well as the corruption of wardens), and (b) the evolution of the behaviours (group and individual) of its inmates, with their new interpretations of freedom, power, hierarchy, and so on. As a consequence, Anjum Habib finds herself in the midst of mysterious and picayune dissections of social intercourse and grading within the prison world. She has to relearn what humiliation or suffering means in this specific context of the political prison. There is a return to a type of social nakedness and defencelessness—except that in prison, one is forcibly and peremptorily turned into a special kind of adult, and no childhood or family or school or polity can prepare one for this particular type of sociality and commerce. One makes new friends, steps into well-worn hierarchies, learns a new language of silence, gesture, movement, humiliation, and appeasement. The prison has been a fecund space for Indian political and nationalist writing—Nehru, Gandhi, Savarkar, Bhagat Singh, and several others. This archive would include fictionalized versions based on actual historical and personal experience, such as the Hindi writer Agyeya’s Shekhar (discussed at length in the third chapter of this book). As in Agyeya’s autobiographical novel from the 1940s, Anjum Habib’s writings also speak of prison as fostering the intense

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kind of solitude that breeds both introspection as well as hallucination. There is a fertility of ideas, new imaginations of social relations, transformations of memory and expectation, and an altered sense of the world outside. This is part of the growth within prison. From the early days of her arrest, there was a persistent sense of unreality. The arrest is not always a midnight knock on the door. Rather, an arrest turns day into midnight, and was more an out-of-body experience, as though ‘my soul had suddenly left my body’ (Habib, 1). An act by the external polity leaves a wound in the deepest part of one’s being. Habib feels that hers is an unreal body that one has to haul about from court to jail, and back again. There is an alienation from the body even when she leaves jail for the final time. She remembers staggered moments of the arrest, the conviction, entering the threshold of prison, and then finally the sense of an equal unreality and duplicity when she returns to the ‘normal, non-criminal’ outside world. Each of these moments is as much concrete as abstract and drifting, as much of the body as out-of-body. There is an extreme attention that one pays to reality—the minute by minute memory of the fateful day of arrest, the quality of glance of the policewomen who handcuffed her. In retrospect, there is a feeling of unreality in that very clarity; the sensation is both proximate and distant— ‘pounding [but also a] sound that was muffled; faint, like a far-away sound’ (4). The suspicious sense of the decay of memory is enhanced by the free use of drugs to quiet the prisoners. What is one’s own mind, and what is pharmaceutically induced? To what extent is the unreality due to the constant diminishment of trust—of fellow prisoners and of the warden? There is a loss of trust in both the possibility of solidarity with other inmates as well as the minimal moral legitimacy of the state. There is insomnia and a reshaping of identity in the hallucinatory zone of the prison—why me, how me, what now? Rumours are pervasive of the many closed-circuit televisions

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(CCTVs) all around, as also the many fire-hazards within the prison space—for the prison is vulnerable to any stressed arsonist or desperate suicidal prisoner. There are further rumours that underneath the meditation hall are weapons and bodies, and still another that the person next to you (convicted for murder) might demonstrate her patriotism by killing the Kashmiri militant. The body is bruised, the heart congested, and there is a vivid ageing for someone unused to a Delhi summer so far from Kashmir’s dappled valleys. There is depression and blankness, the feeling of despair when even wellmeaning researchers and scholars interview her but confess that they can do nothing concretely beneficial—Anjum Habib felt their interviews somewhat exploitative (134). Despite the comings and goings of sympathizers, she felt that the ‘slow pace of justice reduced them [prisoners] to non-being’ (154). Waiting endlessly over the five years made her feel as if she had stepped out of a nightmare mythology: ‘My eyes were turning into stone waiting for these gates to open for me’ (183). The primary experience is the loss of self: Habib enters an intricate hierarchy and joins this new world as an immigrant at the lowest level, cleaning toilets, practicing the performative argot of new servilities to both senior prisoners and jail authorities. Prisoners and authorities mimic each other in a repeated performance of the binary of arrestor and arrested. Alienated, repetitive labour leads to a de-individuation of identity. There is a loss of the sense of the meaningfulness of one’s past life of dissent. As Simone Weil has remarked, ‘Too great an affliction places a human being beneath pity: it arouses disgust, horror and scorn’ (Weil 2002, 4). In the Dalit writer and activist Bama’s memoir Karukku (Palmyra Leaves), an example is given of this ritual de-individuation that happens even to policemen: ‘If one policeman slapped the headman’s face, all the rest followed, slapping him in the very same spot. If one stamped on him, then everyone else did the same’ (Bama 2011, 39). Uniforms re-enforce this sense

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of the substitutability of one prisoner for another, one policeman for another, one woman’s poor health for another, one’s waiting for another, one death for another, one family tragedy for another. However, not all individualities are entirely lost or submerged: ‘Anger is a gift from my time in jail’ (Habib 2011, 55). Anger individuates: in conversations around extreme disadvantage, as will often be seen in Dalit memoirs, anger seems to be both undeclared and yet, suffused in every vein. This is a distinct achievement—affect that is both detached and penetrating, similar to Ambedkar’s tone in Waiting for a Visa. There may be no visible outlet for that anger, for jail is a time of waiting, and any expression of anger will ineluctably delay release. Yet, the rosary of fixed dates, the events of one’s life strung out, is an exposed—even if muted—representation of steely anger: ‘Every prisoner remembers the date of her arrest, the number of court dates, what transpired on each date, the number of times the judge was absent, on which day and date’ (125). This utterly skeletal sense of meaning—bare dates of court-appearance, names of judges who hold one’s fate in their hands, the repressed faith that justice might be served—is the self on the verge of the most humble inorganicity, immobility, death. It is a life stripped bare. And there is further the irrational, yet deeply felt, ‘guilt of the victim’—Anjum Habib’s book is dedicated to those who do not ‘lose hope despite extreme torture and humiliation … to my mother, Boba, who lost her sight with the tears she shed for me’. As Habib notes, prison changes not just your sense of self but the very postures of bodily behaviour for a long time afterward, that is, even after you are released. The translator Sahba Husain remarks: ‘Anjum’s sister told me that when she was first brought home after her release, Anjum could not sleep on a mattress anymore and for weeks she preferred to sleep on the bare floor. She found it difficult to bathe and change into a fresh set of clothes; she did not sit out under the open sky but wished to stay inside the room. She found

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it difficult to eat what was cooked at home including her favourite dishes: “My body hurts; my back is sore and my knees are stiff ”’ (xii). Each sense is fashioned anew: ‘The sound of the keys when cells are opened or locked is an indicator of the time of day or night’(xvi). Keys become a distinct sound, the self lies tangled amidst its senses— in prison, you are kicked, not called to check if you are alive (9). Only the faint contact with the retreating real world (visits, letters, memories) keeps one sane, but relations with family and friends are irrevocably changed—many are afraid of being associated with the incarcerated, knowing that even when the prisoner is released, she would be tainted, making her family, social, and professional life in the future one of unremitting strain. After prison, the meaning of political action becomes obscure, confused—Habib could not relate easily anymore to activists who shouted slogans, even if they were supporting her causes. As noted, there have been several canonical nationalist voices from prison. But their stay helped the leaders claim legitimacy, and the prison voice served as an index of patriotism. Many of Nehru’s tomes on ancient India, as well as his warm letters to his daughter, were written in prison. There were new solidarities and insights into political struggle for Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. No such illumination imbues Anjum Habib’s retrospective voice. The injuries to the body retard thoughts of either homeland or friend. There is the nuclear family and her lawyer. Confinement thwarts larger notions of solidarity. There is a shrinking of the mind and yet, the account is enlightening for what it elaborates of solitude, suffering, and the meagre bones of courtesy and concern that remain. Her suffering did not help her enunciate a more clarified, easily intelligible political or personal position, as it seemed to have done for the leaders of the nationalist struggle. For her, prison remained a ground zero, a place from where she felt she could not quite rise from the cold, stony floor. This sense of prison being a cave from where one must utterly

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re-interpret one’s life is present not so much in the historical record of leaders but in the literary record, and Agyeya’s Shekhar is a fairly fleshed exemplar. Instead of a redoubled love for one’s homeland, there is rather a disorienting mistrust. When one is arrested, one is aware of the tendency of the police to arrest many people simultaneously, so communication between the several arrested (often at different locations) is rendered uncertain. These others arrested (one’s own group, or another rival group) may then turn informer. As in some modern version of religious determinism, one feels certain that some of those arrested will be let-off (for turning informer, or for lack of evidence), while others will be incarcerated indefinitely, based on mysterious charges and the public and media insistence that at least some be punished. Because one might be let off due to some backroom deal, the hope that one may be the lucky person only adds to one’s bitterness if the hope goes unrealized or begins to seem increasingly wishful (Sethi 2014). There is a banality to incrimination—nameless people entering names and numbers into your diary, forcing you to sign, and other officers pretending to be shocked to recognize names of dreaded organizations in your personal papers (4). Anjum Habib is sparsely informed of the status of her case, which feels as if it is being decided on some alien planet. She has to trust nuggets of information brought by her family or lawyers who are themselves often misinformed, deliberately or by the byzantine nature of the Indian penal system. Till the end, it remains unclear who had brought the case against her in the first place—could it be a rival faction? In prison, she is forced to learn Hindi, prescribed as part of the larger self-righteousness against people of her region and language (10). The police, presumably for documentation purposes, insist that even Kashmiri lawyers speak in Hindi. The ethnicity of the wardens often dictated their relation to the prisoner. Speech and writing in

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one’s language becomes precious—Habib says, ‘Writing letters, I felt as though I was partially home and partly here in jail; I would be in such a complex mental state, lost in memories, that it took hours to write a single letter’ (93). There is, for Habib, a deeply felt relationship with both Urdu and Kashmiri that is at odds with the sloganeering that these languages have been reduced to in political discourse. Why write an account at all, an account that will have to be mediated by many factors? Sahba Husain, the translator, begins by confessing the many issues that warp the narrative and give us a sense of the complexities of mediating a voice that was emerging from so terrible a site as the prison. To begin with, Sahba Husain never visited Habib in prison—this had hurt Habib, who openly remarked on this and made her friend feel even more guilty. Was it fear, a fear that had even retrospectively contaminated their past relationship (Sahba Husain had wondered if she should burn their old letters)? But slowly, Habib began to speak to Husain of her days in prison, and the bond was re-forged. Habib needed a listening ear, as she began to wonder about what she needed to do next. Husain gave her something her family wasn’t quite able to: ‘My family wants me to be happy, to smile and laugh now that I am free, but I don’t feel anything … my back is sore and my knees are stiff’ (xii). It was this empathy that slowly gave Husain the courage to ask Habib to write of her days in jail. Though Habib initially demurred, when she decided to go ahead, the writing came quickly and fluently. But that meant someone would have to translate from Urdu to English. Husain was persuaded to do this as she realized that the translation would intensify their friendship and also give her access to the spirit of the account, to that totality of experience that cannot be reduced to the simple legal facts of the case. Husain writes in the Translator’s Note: ‘I am reminded of other evocative passages in the book that are a simple and lyrical narration of a complex subject, such as “time”—how it takes on a different dimension for

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women with the confines of the imposing walls of the jail. Many of the women inmates who did not read or write or follow an “English calendar” would remember the time of their arrest, of the number of visits they made to the courts, by the prevailing seasons: If it was the rainy season for one, it was spring for another, the mango season for someone … phagun [the twelfth month of the Hindu calendar] and the marriage season are also mentioned as markers of time …’ (xv–xvi). There is a healing that writing and sharing can achieve, for Anjum Habib’s account is also a mode of contemplation, an enlargement of our sense of time, space, and the horizon of freedom. There is, finally, the achievement of the dry-eyed, dispassionate voice— comparable with Ambedkar’s Waiting for a Visa—a tone of both detachment and intimacy, with passionate detail of righteous anger as well as a measured peace-making with the past. Inset 2: The Mutating Revolution It is not surprising that all kinds of minority questions—linguistic, ethnic, regional, about sex, or youth—resurge not only as archaisms, but in up-to-date revolutionary forms which call once more into question in an entirely immanent manner both the global economy of the machine and the assemblages of national States. Instead of gambling on the eternal impossibility of the revolution and on the fascist return of a war-machine in general, why not think that a new type of revolution is in the course of becoming possible, and that all kinds of mutating, living machines conduct wars, are combined and trace out a plane of consistence which undermines the plane of organization of the World and the States? —Deleuze and Parnet (1988, 110; italics in original)

The prison is a crucible of selfhood—Anjum Habib writes that ‘whoever got lodged in jail once, his/her name was struck off the list of human beings’ (154). It is a micro-cosmos where one confronts a

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reified hierarchy in its nakedness and materiality, and feels the full weight of an abstract set of norms and regulations on one’s body and behaviour. But even in the home, intuitively the most intimate site, one can feel equally burdened with the weight of social and familial norms—norms that get heightened when they receive strength from more ‘scientific’ epistemologies, such as those of a jurisprudential or medical establishment. Michel Foucault’s early works (such as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison as well as Madness and Civilisation) were among the first to systematically analyse such liminal sites—the prison, as also the psychiatric clinic (Foucault 1991; Foucault 1988). The norms that pervade the clinic are as weighty as those of the prison, and not unlinked from them, as Foucault has also shown in Birth of the Clinic (Foucault 2003). Part of the complication of these norms is their lack of a fixed locus, for they often traverse the clinic and the prison, the home and the school. In India, much mental health care is done at home; but the home, sometimes bearing the brunt of large political events such as Partition, finds itself saturated with many alien social rules and norms (Bhasin and Menon 1998). Home can thus be a prison too, and not only in a metaphoric sense, as the tradition of feminist scholarship has insistently reminded us—from at least as early and as comprehensively as the pioneering work of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Gilbert and Gubar 1979). In this context, Reshma Valliappan’s memoir fallen, standing (Valliappan 2015; lower case in original) speaks of growing up as a member of an even less visible, atomized minority than the explicit political campaigner such as Anjum Habib—the mentalhealth dissenter. Like Habib, Reshma Valliappan carries the weight of social censure on her self and body, and they both find themselves pinioned by the gaze of a varied and intersecting set of norms (family, neighbourhood, state, medical, and jurisprudential discourse, and so on). Valliappan’s defiant subtitle is My life as a ‘schizophrenist’, where she reclaims her identity and experience in an affirmative, defiant,

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and optimistic manner. Though there are many important points of difference, both Habib and Valliappan serve as comparable analogues in post-colonial citizenship: both underline the narrative creation of selves that have as their essence the meaningful recognition and communication of diverse forms of suffering that is at once particular and universal, political and personal, dispassionate and intimate. For both, writing is the essence of that responsible citizenship and construction of community. Reshma Valliappan does not specify her work in genre-terms—as autobiography or memoir or account. In narratives such as hers, which are very new and exceptional in Indian publishing, the Subject finds herself speaking into the dark. She cannot know who all the addressees are, and there will be many who will only slowly emerge— many of whom will emerge only after several years. Even to be caught reading these books may carry stigma in many contexts. This gap, between speaker and reader, between the saying and the understood, is very vast—as Levinas writes, ‘separation is not reflected in thought, but produced by it’ (Levinas 1969, 54). As individual readers, we read through, aware that we do not occupy the place of the full addressee, for the speech is addressed to many others, many who may have a greater knowledge or experience of mental difficulty. There are always trails of invisible genealogies and descendants, those of the far past and the far future, the many concealed veins of suffering that extend in all directions in the polity. Reshma Valliappan’s book was not intended to be published and was first written to the publisher as a ‘series of emails … written mostly in first person, but sometimes in third. It followed no predictable chronology’ (Valliappan 2015, under Publisher’s Note, unpaginated). In Valliappan, Habib, Ambedkar, and other such voices, there is hesitancy and doubt. The end of the work is not wisdom or respite but the tracing of ever finer tissues of vulnerability, the accumulation and naming of debts. Valliappan writes on the last page: ‘My list of mothers, adopted

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mothers, mothers-to-be, and animal-mothers seems to grow’ (260). There is also boldness and occasional notes of fierceness and anger at the injustice of it all: I learnt more about my label [schizophrenia], I accepted it, and I continue living with it. Then again, today I get remarks like, ‘You don’t look schizophrenic.’ I wonder again, ‘What does a schizophrenic look like?’ It reminds me of the case of a woman with cerebral palsy who was offloaded from a flight because she looked ‘mentally ill’. Is this what the world thinks of the mentally ill? Do we have it printed on our foreheads: ‘LUNATIC’? … They have denied me the basic fundamental rights of the Constitution of India. They have taken away my legal capacity by a simple label. I cannot vote, I cannot sign a contract, I cannot hold office, I have no right to the same education, I have no say in my treatment, I can be held against my own will … I have to pay tax. (x–xi)

Whereas Foucault’s earlier work had implicitly emphasized the stasis of powerful epistemologies, in his later years his interest had shifted to the self as it broke through charged spaces, such as the prison or the clinic. Of such risk-taking practices of truth-telling, self, and the spring for freedom, he remarked: [The] relation to the soul is part of a set: relation to bios, to the body, to the passions, to the events … which one teaches of and passes on through examples; which one implements throughout one’s existence … and their aim is to constitute an ethos, a way of being and doing things … [of ] founding the existence of freedom. (Foucault 2011, 338)

In Reshma Valliappan’s narrative, there are ascents and descents, shifting moods of anger and reticence, indecisions, but in essence, the language—though riven in pain—is inviting, hospitable, with hope for finding that empathetic reader. It insists that if you really

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listen, this truth-telling is more important than anything else you have listened to in your life. It is a primary duty, but such parrhesia (that is, courageous speech, as explicated by Foucault) is not ultimately beholden to the listener, or perhaps even to the speaker. Language is its own gift and pleasure, as is truth and meaningfulness, the body, the endurance, and the skein of I and the self. There is only the play of breath, the opaque star, the ascendant wave of silence that cuts through bloodied speech. A silence surrounds and deepens. One must remember this, especially if, as Valliappan writes: ‘And my existential question, “Who am I?” is replaced by what the world thinks of me: “What are you?”’ (xi). And the world’s lack of listening is accompanied by its Constitutional refusal to grant legal or moral authority—as for Anjum Habib, so for Reshma Valliappan, as well as for the hapless, drenched Ambedkar in Chalisgaon. What is being lost in our refusal to hear the courageous (even if chaotic) voices of these speakers who are inventing, in Foucault’s words, a whole ethos, a new freedom? The back cover of fallen, standing (and the Preface) identifies Reshma Valliappan as having been diagnosed as schizophrenic. The narrative is a meditation on the category. If to an extent Valliappan is forced to accept the category, it is also one that she continually wrestles with. The form of the book—a series of emails to an editor—is a rebuttal to those who think language and categories reveal themselves in simple transparency. Much of the book is indeed an attack on the insuperable weight of the word/category of schizophrenia. Medical terminologies, despite their avowed claims, are rarely neutral or functional—they brand themselves on the consciousness of both the pathologized as well as the family, school, professional peer-group, employer, and so on. The separation of the first and third person (often identified with the move from the autobiographic to the fictional) represents in Valliappan’s work a quite literal instantiation of trauma and dissociation (88).

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The schizophrenist, for Valliappan, is she who does not entirely sublimate multiple, younger, traumatized selves into the older, mature, rational being, one capable of simply ‘moving on’. Parts of the book, perhaps the episodes hardest to absorb for the protagonist, are written in the third person. The ‘she’ is not just un-accommodable, but actively one who is ‘annoying … hated … embarrassing’ (89). Such writing mixes tenses, for the present is inseparable from the past, and the undead child within the surfaces alienates the adult self from the parents, friends, and peers. The protagonist—unlike the normative rational, capable adult—finds that she just cannot keep up with the flow of her history, with time passing, with the overcoming and the conquering of the past. Rather, trauma and childhood (as reversible representations of each other) keeps cutting into the present, erupting in unpredictable ways. When Anjum Habib wrote letters home from prison, it was as if an older self was being fashioned in that forced adult act of writing; likewise, Valliappan’s epistolary form undermines the notions of easily commensurable present and past selves. Such narratological experiments with the sudden eruption of past trauma are also central to the writing of Dalit and prisoner narratives explored in chapters two and three respectively of this book. Conceptually, there may be reasons to analogize the hallucinatory worlds that Valliappan and Habib inhabit. This hallucinatory world is not entirely disconnected from actuality—there are many insights of the actual (‘real’) world that may best be grasped from the vantage of that hallucinatory world. There are insights into politics, into relationships between parents and children, the citizen and the state, into extreme affects as they run up against claustrophobic norms, be they institutional or epistemological. When Sahba Husain, the translator, gently probes the homo-social relations within prison, Anjum Habib avers: ‘it’s not just sexual violence but intimate sexual relations between women prisoners that are an integral part of their

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life in jail’ (Habib, xvii). Beyond this admission, it seems both the translator and the author choose a delicate reticence. In contrast, Valliappan’s work offers an open discussion of dimensions such as sexuality, drugs, and self-harm. Valliappan feels the full weight of the categorial minutiae of the medical and police records. The effects of labelling/diagnosis is not confined to a particular space (such as the cell of involuntary confinement, the therapy room, or the behavioural camp) but to the range of her life in its social, professional, familial, educational, and romantic aspects. The act of writing, truth-telling, and giving testimony is, even if imperfectly, therapeutic. The aim is not to forget or forgive but to cultivate an emotional courage and precision: ‘They [emotions] have been skilfully carved and painted and polished … this truly is my greatest masterpiece’ (Valliappan 2015, 182). Emotions are sometimes clarified by the breaking of bonds—numerous friends and family leave—but for those who stay, there is an intensification of solidarity and the excitement of the creation of a new community, a new politics of participation, speech, and hope. Valliappan’s book is part of a powerful cluster of mental-health narratives that are among the most significant literary and political accomplishments of contemporary India—some of the other significant memoirs (or novelizations that have been admitted to be personal histories) include the works of Meena Kandasamy, Arjun Nath, Jerry Pinto, Gayathri Prabhu, and Amandeep Sandhu (Kandasamy 2017; Nath 2016; Pinto 2013; Prabhu 2017; Sandhu 2008). Though these writers are not analysed in detail in this book, there is little doubt that they share and inherit much from the writers who are—especially in their fierce commitment to speaking the truth of a fragmented, injured self and mind. There is commitment to the crafting of a self from this fragmentation—post-structuralist fragmentation is not an ideal in itself but only serves as an opening for a re-imagination into a wider and more deeply felt affirmation.

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This book also stresses the paradigmatic case of the Dalit memoir as systematically articulating all these travails of selfhood through injury and negative affect. Dalit studies, with their fine-grained understanding of the long-terms affects of humiliation and injustice, have flourished in recent years with the powerful work of scholars that include Gopal Guru, D. R. Nagaraj, Aniket Jaaware, K. Satyanarayana, Susie Tharu, Laura Brueck, and Sarah Beth Hunt among others (Brueck 2014; Guru 2009; Hunt 2014; Jaaware 2018; Menon 2005; Nagaraj 2012; Satyanarayana and Rawat 2017). At a still wider concentric circle, it is worth underlining the rich contemporary scholarship on diverse Indian literatures that has highlighted key themes of an ethical, vulnerable subjectivation. Influential examples include Milind Wakankar on subalternity as an opening into religion, Simona Sawhney on the surprising eruptions of tradition in the contemporary, Udaya Kumar on the relation of the self to the writing, Toral Gajarawala and Ulka Anjaria of the weight nationalism inflicts on the conventions of literary realism, and Kiran Keshavamurthy on masculinity (Anjaria 2012; Gajarawala 2012; Keshavamurthy 2016; Kumar 2017; Sawhney 2008; Wakankar 2010). The deepening scholarship on the various Indian languages inevitably raises many issues that go beyond that particular linguistic region. Within the broader terrain of postcolonial studies, the oeuvre of Leela Gandhi, in her insistence on the reading of marginal kinships as providing imaginative alternatives to the restrictive mainstream colonialism/nationalism dyad, has been particularly fruitful; as she asserts in Affective Communities: ‘Perhaps it is time for post-colonial thought to offer similar acknowledgment to a poetic view of the world. … To refuse this gesture, and here is the burden of this chapter, is to surrender the political to the joylessness of a utilitarian dispensation’ (2006, 176). She continues to maintain the case in her later work, The Common Cause: ‘Transplanted in diverse political ecologies, it [sadhana, that is, traditional Indian spiritual and moral practice] took the form, variously, of cosmophilia;

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the cultivation of enfeebling attachments to the world; neutrality; the refusal to take sides in violent conflict, always against the temptation of heroism yet with total disregard for personal safety; and finally, contagious subjectivity’ (2014, 151). The Arrangement of Affective Motifs This book is envisaged as a series of five studies highlighting certain theoretical and affective motifs related to the Subject—injustice, voice, the movement of self-making, embodiment, and so on. These themes are intertwined, and it is the intent—through detailed, close reading—to bring out these thematic intertwinings. Before attending to the chapterization, a brief note may be made of the pragmatics of the methodology followed. As explained, this book discusses literature from diverse languages and decades, but it is the thematic logic of subjectivity and its modes that underpin the structure and sequencing. Texts analysed begin with those rooted in the contemporary (living writers such as K. R. Meera and Urmila Pawar are the subjects of the first two chapters respectively), then probe their inheritance via a detour into older canonical writers (Agyeya and Ismat Chughtai, and Saratchandra Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore for the third and fourth chapters respectively) before ending with the veteran writer Krishna Sobti, whose life and work encapsulates so much of the second half of the twentieth century. Finally, though many of the novelists may be canonical or widely known, one cannot assume that every reader is familiar with the plot-details of the novels discussed. This book is essentially a work of close reading; to prevent the reader from getting lost in a maze of plot points, the reading will for the most part go text by text. Though the chapters in this book chiefly explore the genre of the novel, the key category is not so much the genre (fiction/ non-fiction/history/memoir), as the first-person stance, or the subjective

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sensibility that utters and creates the many unique languages of pain. This idea germinates in this Prelude to the project through its investment in first-person accounts—Ambedkar, Habib, and Valliappan. In foregrounding the concern of subjectivities that are constantly splintering and consolidating, this project seeks to rethink the more conventional organizing principles (in literary scholarship) of genre and chronology. Towards this end, the chapters of the book have been deliberately shaped around select thematic strands framed by the first-person stance across multiple genres (memoir, autobiography, novel, essay), for the subjective voice adapts the genre to its narrative needs, rather than the other way around. The project is constantly aware and reflexive of the constraints of a claim shaped by the stylistic and thematic disparities in the texts selected. However, by not limiting the texts to linguistic or chronological placements, the book seeks to unearth more fecund patterns of subject-formation and foregrounds the agentiality of the subjective voice outside of the limitations that placements of pure chronology or genre impose. As Foucault remarks, parrhesia— the speech of courage with its insistence of truth—conceptually precedes the split of fiction, autobiography, historiology, or the police and medical record (2011). One can now get down to the sequence of studies: The first study is devoted to one of the most celebrated novels of contemporary India—K. R. Meera’s Hangwoman (2014). Meera’s work brings an energetic and fiercely feminist perspective on the nature and forms of injustice—her work insightfully weaves together the varied elements (state, family, media) that perpetuate injustice through their powerful conjunctions. The experience of suffering is immediately felt as unjust—in Meera’s work, the givenness of pain is always accompanied by the sense of the attainability of a measure of freedom via a newly introspective and agential relation to the world. In all the women protagonists in her fiction, there is a sense of defiance and

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exuberance, even with regard to the repugnant situations they find themselves in. The protagonist of Hangwoman is a young woman (Chetna) born into an impoverished caste of executioners; yet she manages to turn that dire situation inside out and ruthlessly capitalize on it. The second study persists with this theme of the alchemy that turns felt pain into agency and self-growth, with an extended analysis of Urmila Pawar’s memoir Aaydan (Weave of Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, 2008). The study parses how powerful negative affects such as humiliation may also productively inflect the writerly voice of the memoir as it stakes a claim to livelihood and communityparticipation. Even if there is no sense of the terminability of humiliation or suffering, this bildung (that is, developmental self ) of negative affect and self creates conscious agency, subjecthood, and modes of action. Hamid Dabashi has thoughtfully related bildung to the idea of adab—the latter refers to a life that has both exquisite manners but also moral pathos, embodied testimony, and relations to social power and judgment (Dabashi 2012). Pawar’s work encapsulates much of the grace of this way of being in the world. The third study takes up the question of the bildung/adab with reference to the earlier decades of the novelistic tradition in India. It evaluates Shekhar, a canonical novel from the 1940s, written by Agyeya, who was one of the founding figures of Indian poetic and novelistic modernism. Shekhar is the life-story of a young man. Seemingly always alienated from his family, he is educated in different parts of the country, and in each of these parts he carves out distinct relationships with people who are not the sort he would be able to bring home to his respectable middle-class family. Toward the end of college, he is enmeshed in revolutionary politics. As the crisis with the police mounts, he is also caught up in a relationship with a married cousin. The novel ends with her death. This study deliberates on how the traditional form of the bildung is under strain when it

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has to undergird extreme affects such as finitude (the shadow of his imminent hanging accompanies the entire narrative) and the sense of utter isolation and estrangement from family, friends, and institutions. To deflate, even if gently, the hyperbole of existentialism that is Shekhar, the novel is contrasted with another equally canonical novel of the time—Ismat Chughtai’s The Crooked Line, with its many manifestations of savage wit. The fourth study stays with the nominal form of the bildung— the chapter is a discussion of another canonical text, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta (1937). Here again, Srikanta the protagonist, like Shekhar, is a restless wanderer who abjures the conventions of stable, monogamous domesticity and livelihood. However, the narrative of Srikanta gives greater agency to his fellow wanderer, the courtesan Pyari Bai (a schoolmate of Srikanta’s childhood). Though there is a sense of censure and shame that haunts the lives of Pyari and Srikanta, these negative affects—not unlike many Dalit narratives—allow the invention of a new non-judgmental and sensitive masculinity, as well as a greater freedom and expressiveness in the boldness of its women characters. The fifth and last study consists of an analysis of select novels of Krishna Sobti. Sobti’s oeuvre showcases varied types of subjectpositions for its female characters: from a woman trapped in a traditional joint family (as in To Hell With You, Mitro and Memory’s Daughter), to the single, working woman (Sunflowers in the Dark and Listen Girl! ); often the same novel, as in The Heart Has Its Reasons, has both types of women. The givenness of the position—householder or working-woman—disallows an easy nostalgia; the past as past, unlikely to have been pleasant anyway, is rare in Sobti’s oeuvre. For Sobti, the bildung in its classic descriptive, developmental, retrospective mode is less arresting than the vivid insistence of the present. A range of expertly crafted voices abound in Sobti’s oeuvre—anger, humour, tartness, profound melancholy, deep solitariness, the voices

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of the unmarried and the ageing, and of the bitter and the unforgiving. Sobti’s liveliness amidst manifest pain recalls K. R. Meera— perhaps it is a passing of the baton. Yet, the fact that the very voice of literature is often threatened in contemporary India is discussed in the Conclusion, where author Perumal Murugan and the case of One Part Woman is discussed. Perumal Murugan, one of India’s most prominent novelists, was threatened by a mob as his novel supposedly maligned a community. Pained at this accusation, Murugan wrote in a Facebook post in 2015 that he would never write again. In July 2016, the High Court dismissed the charges against him. The Conclusion of the present volume analyses this High Court judgment as it brings together many of the themes of this book—how do articulations of death, suffering, and the meaning of agency within a diagetic literary space mirror the world outside? What may offer an introspective ethics and aesthetics for our time? How does intense negative affect still generate new voices, forms of livelihood, and political participation? The design of the book has been inspired by the foregrounding of the relationship of ethical subjectivity to affective and metaphysical questions of self and freedom. In doing so, it traces the contours of a subjectivity that can at best be located in fleeting affect (such as humiliation, fear, wit, and resilience) and indeed, whose insight and power is served best by that very fleetingness, by that unwillingness to speak in too authoritarian a tone, but rather through an ethics of listening, silence, patience, and attention. And hence, there are particular debts to two philosophers who come closest to the temperament of this book. Emmanuel Levinas and Krishnachandra Bhattacharya have persisted in their oeuvre with metaphysical and theological questions, recognizing them as inseparable from the elusive categories of self and subjectivity. Levinas’s persevering meditations on shared suffering, led by a painstaking exegesis of ancient and modern texts, gave me a starting point to

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think of questions of self vis-à-vis questions of suffering (or ‘evil’, to place it in the more theological idiom). Hopefully, there is also the possibility of the rewiring of a psyche that resists the move to anger and counter-violence, and instead chooses to meditate on new mythographies of the human (as he attempts in both Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being). This may be the only way to break the cycle of vengeance and reprisal. Similarly, Krishnachandra Bhattacharya repeatedly re-affirms the richness of that initial gesture of turning away from pain as the opening of a process of introspective subjectivity that may culminate, for a few, over a long and arduous journey of ‘body-phenomenology’ in a type of spiritual wisdom and freedom (a freedom emblematized in the craft of the artwork). Bhattacharya’s influence on this book cannot be captured by citation: the essential structure of each of the chapters—a section elaborating negative affect followed by a section elaborating diverse forms of moral and free action (such as writing, or bold speech, or nomadicism, or teaching)—owes much to his studies of Sankhya and Yoga philosophy. That wisdom and freedom will be final breach of the binaries of inner and outer, self and feeling, action and freedom, purpose and embodiment.

First Study Injustice and the Self

Justice would not be possible without the singularity, the unicity of subjectivity. In this justice subjectivity does not figure as a formal reason, but as individuality. —Levinas (1969, 246) Everything gives rise to obedience—both hope and hopelessness. —Grossman (2006, 215) My memory keeps getting in the way of your history /… My history keeps getting in the way of your memory. —Ali (2010, 177)

The question of suffering has the sense of injustice hardwired into it—injustice is a tangible, visceral experience and demands a response. Despite the modern world’s formidable bureaucracies of justice (the court system, tribunals, legislatures, and so on), the fierce sense of injustice insists on a relation to the human grounding of even those Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature. Nikhil Govind, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199498727.003.0001

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abstracted bureaucracies. Judges and politicians and journalists have faces, and hangmen too—those last administrators of the sword of the community. A vision of justice at an extremity, a limit-case, can begin at this foundational, indelible figure of the hangman (or, as one will soon see, the hangwoman). By keeping one’s eye on this figure, a narrative is able to build a bottom-up notion of injustice that can be phenomenologically richer than the more theoretical burden of, say, arguing against capital punishment. As the current study is concerned with ethics, it may be apt to begin this first chapter at a liminal beginning, in the throes of last figures, those in extremis—the silent (if thrashing) dyad of the taciturn hangman and the hanged. Working backward or upward from this, whole storeys of justice/injustice may be lit up—storeys of the ‘small’ personages (not just the hangman but also the police constable, the underpaid public prosecutor, the social worker). One can argue that one ascends those storeys (or those hierarchies) to find at the upper end the more lordly personages—the judges and politicians themselves, but also new players such as the modern Indian television media. To locate a novel within these systems (the judiciary, the media, the legislature, the presidential pardon, and so on) is to play on a given objectivation of justice as not only impersonal, blind, and scrupulous but also personal and intimate, full of agency and desire. This is because the personal and intimate (that is, the human) cannot be entirely annulled, even as it is perpetually vulnerable under the sway of an abstractive, self-interested and self-perpetuating, bureaucracy of justice. The court drama as the staple of television and other forms of popular culture is evidence of this indeterminacy of the personal and the impersonal. The justice system normatively exists for the corrigibility and addressability of human suffering. When this institutional site itself engenders further suffering, there is the feeling of betrayal and a double injustice. There is much dramatic potential in this situation of the addressal being worse than the crime,

First Study

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the solution being worse than the cure. This chapter centres on K. R. Meera’s novel Hangwoman, which has an uncommon angle on these notions of justice, betrayal, suffering, and agency. The novel is focalized not through the traditional sacrificial subjectivity of the wrongly convicted but through the perspective of the executioner. The executioner is Chetna, a 22-year-old woman. Hanging is her traditional family profession. Because it is imagined to be immemorial, it has accreted many ritual and religious dimensions—the grandmother is the keeper of this sacred genealogical lore. Her father is aged, her brother disabled, there is much economic distress, and Chetna lives in poverty—the job of the hangman/hangwoman is at the lowest governmental strata, a profession that is finding it difficult to maintain its existence in the modern state; the state would prefer more advanced and impersonal technological means. Chetna is forced to take over the family profession due to her father’s age and her brother’s indisposition. The story seems set for an uncommon, yet recognizable, form of pathos. The novel’s further twist is that Chetna is constructed as a particularly feisty, determined character who seems cynical enough to be able to use this situation for ends that would far exceed the moral code of a quiet, low-profile death-making. One would be expected to be full of shame and horror at having such a profession. But Chetna senses that the repugnance of her profession is its own kind of opportunity, and she wants to make the most of a bad hand by embracing this world of hanging—for the new players on the scene are the sensationalist 24-hour-live news channels. These channels see the hanging as a dramatic spectacle—archaic, visceral, controversial, and full of surprises and uncertainties (a last-minute reprieve could come any moment, or maybe a moment too late). Everything is breathless. The movement of the plot is how Chetna learns to be unafraid of and capitalize on the ghoulishness of her celebrity status; she seeks to learn to control the media animal and parlay it for personal ambition.

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Inlays of Subjectivity

Chetna grows up in the context of poverty, lack of employment, petty criminality, and the vulnerability of women in dimly-lit metropolitan spaces. There is the recognizable world of low-income housing full of uncleaned drainage and the noise of trains, the cries of animals being led to the sacrifice, and the strange mixed scent of ghee and corpses (2014, 1). And yet, amid all this harrowing destitution, the author K. R. Meera gifts Chetna with an astringent voice; the novel completely breaks with the idea of using a capital-punishment context as ripe for melodramatic pity, a cry against wanton state violence. As the literary scholar Toral Gajarawala writes of dominant forms of Indian realism: ‘Pity, sympathy, guilt: these are the emotions that move plots in the world of early Premchand [one of India’s most influential novelists]’ (Gajarawala 2012, 47). There is little of the melodrama of pity in Hangwoman; instead, the central psychological perspective of the novel is about opportunity, cynicism, and the determination of the protagonist to capture worldly success despite the stigma of being an executioner. K. R. Meera was not the first to see the dramatic potential of the hanging of 2004. The historical case was already gruesome and famous. A 39-year-old man, Dhananjoy Chatterjee, was accused of raping and killing a 14-year-old schoolgirl. It was the only occasion of a hanging in India after 2000 where there was no accusation of terrorism—that is, it was a crime with no threat to the security of the state. There was much media description of the trial, as well as films such as the 2017 Bengali film Dhananjoy. Questions raised in the film (which mirrored the questions asked daily by the newspapers) included Dhananjoy Chatterjee’s likely innocence. The movie highlighted the fact that all the evidence was purely circumstantial, and that there had been no witnesses or foolproof forensic evidence. Both the High Court and the Supreme Court decided to uphold the death penalty as it was seen as a particularly heinous breach of trust—Chatterjee was the security guard

First Study

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of the building. Many scholars had pointed out the weakness of evidence, the mistakes of the police, the callous role of the media, and so on; on the other side of the debate, the chief minister of the state (despite having no legal authority on the issue) had himself expressed his wish that the hanging take place (Press Trust of India 2004). What is the jurisprudential position on capital punishment in India? The courts in India still uphold the constitutionality of deathby-hanging, glossing that it is not ‘cruel punishment. Citing medical opinion, the Court was of the view that death by hanging causes the least pain and was a dignified manner of carrying out death sentences’ (Surendranath 2016, 764). In 2004, there was much media coverage of Dhananjoy Chatterjee’s hanging, and much debate on whether a democratic country such as India should not be moving to prohibit capital punishment in the manner of many progressive countries in the world. Nevertheless, there is clearly much support in the broader public for the idea of capital punishment, especially when the victim is a young woman. To many, including those not living in metropolitan cities, nothing encapsulates the full horror of the metropole than the sexual violation and murder of young women. Later instances of such outrage include the death of the thirteen-year-old Aarushi in Noida; here again, the media played a large role, and much has been written on the tardiness of the police investigation, the prejudices of the judges, the complex investments of security agencies, and so on (Sen 2015). To return to the Dhananjoy Chatterjee case: a documentary made by film-maker Joshy Joseph had camera and crew enter the hangman Nata Mullick’s house and spend a day with him as he prepared for the hanging. What strikes one as much as the casual talk of hanging is the appalling poverty of the hangman and his family (Joseph 2005). The documentary raised questions regarding the ethics of hanging as well as the nature of state economic support for this type of job.

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Inlays of Subjectivity

The opening lines in the documentary refer to the already obsessive media interest in Mullick, likening it to the hysteria surrounding medieval Europe’s public executions. Many of the themes that Meera extended in her novel were already available in the documentary— the pathetic and shrewd figure of Mullick, the rhetoric of both the scientific and religious values of the practice, the balancing of the harsh nature of the act with mundane livelihood concerns, the privacy concerns of not only the accused but also the hangman (liable to be treated as an archaic anomaly by urban India), and the thematization of the media itself as a confusing democratizing, sensationalizing, and commercializing amalgam. The ritual is claimed by the hangman as scientific because it supposedly minimizes pain (as the court judgment also indicates). There is pride in the specialized and difficult labour of the hangman: the task of hanging in practice involved three or four men, as it was believed that the condemned would fight back with extra force due to his having nothing to lose. Hanging was claimed as a religious rite, as it belonged to a longstanding family/ caste tradition, with many gods to be propitiated as part of the ritual process. Joseph had worked with the highly regarded director Adoor Gopalakrishnan on the latter’s movie Nizhalkuthu (Shadow-Kill, 2003), which also had as its central protagonist an aged hangman. However, the documentary moves away from Gopalakrishnan’s concerns. Gopalakrishnan’s movie is set in the 1940s and is preoccupied with the guilt of the hangman, whereas Joseph highlights aspects such as employment and monetary concerns, as well as the suddenly influential role of the media. In Joseph’s work, the hangman had asked that his son inherit his job, because it was both a religious obligation and a stable government employment—and Mullick was willing to use the media as an additional forum for his agendas. This is even as several voices within the metropolitan elite were using the same media to condemn the barbarity of capital punishment in a modern democracy. Inevitably perhaps, Joseph is partly complicit in

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what he censures, that is, invading the privacy of the stigmatized, poverty-stricken freak-figure of the hangman. Hangwoman is of course less concerned about the appropriateness of the legal discourse, or the ultimate guilt or innocence of the accused. Rather, Meera changes the angle of vision: by inventing the character of a young female hangwoman, Meera is able to ask a wholly different set of questions about not only the judicial system but also our cultural and moral orientation regarding questions of gender, class, and justice. In creating a canny young woman (instead of aged men such as those of Gopalakrishnan and Joseph), Meera’s work embraces the new media more boldly by invoking mediasensationalism not just as background but also as master-code for the gendered subjectivity of the first-person narrative. The characters seem to emerge from the minds, actions, and pleasures of the studio, insofar as the latter represents a new construction of public imagination. Narrative Gravity of Negative Affect There is a vast gap between the antipodes of the presidential pardon and the subaltern figure of the hangwoman—indeed, this gap straddles the enunciation of power in democratic India. This last figure is the one who actually, manually, performs the hanging. She is the inflictor of the last human, animate action on the executed. From the moment a hanging is ordered, a relationship is inaugurated between the hangwoman and the condemned, both transported, via the judgment, to the remote shores of human experience. Chetna is, on the one hand, the least important person—it is the elderly men (the public prosecutor, the judge, the president) who determine guilt and punishment. Cases involving death penalty go all the way to the president, so no conscience is left un-besmirched. Yet, justice is impossible without this last naked human hand—and so, Chetna

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Inlays of Subjectivity

is not unimportant at all. Chetna (the name means ‘insurrectionary consciousness’) is both witness and agent, someone whose life criss-crosses that of the condemned in ways that bring to the fore questions of guilt and complicity for the entire polity. Chetna as hangwoman represents all citizens of a state where the death penalty subsists, but in this specific novelistic construction, she is imagined as bringing much verve and forethought to her bleak circumstance. Having grown up as the daughter of a hangman, she inherits a gallows humour as birthright—the everydayness of death allows her a slant-eyed view of life. There is also a dry-eyed sanity to her sense of survival—her need to make a livelihood and support her family. There is a further layer to her that is quickened—sexuality, pleasure, her ambition. With her sari hitched around her waist, she moves freely through the more dangerous parts of the city, past neighbourhood goons, low-income housing, and decrepit government prisons. But even she faces a formidable agonist in the unsettling, though generative, landscape of contemporary media. The novel anatomizes this situation of original disempowerment: the poverty-stricken hangwoman faces the equally poor securityguard/murderer. The novelistic innovation has been Chetna’s fraught, yet astute, determination to carve her own way through what life throws at her. There is a breathlessness to the writing of Chetna’s consciousness as she tries to ride atop conflicting waves of public feeling—repulsion, fascination, and pity. But the following commentary will read a little against the grain of this breathlessness and linger longer on all that Chetna wishes to repress and flee from. What is the phenomenological richness of the description of poverty and disadvantage that the novel evokes before it follows Chetna’s desperate sense of flight from that world? In the novel, poverty is not dwelt on and yet, is simply and effectively sketched (street names, infamously rough Kolkata neighbourhoods, the size of the house, the bareness of the room, and the prospect of a life that just limps

First Study

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from hanging to hanging). The media is introduced in the very first sentence of the novel: ‘When we first heard the news on TV that the governor had rejected Jatindranath Banerjee’s [the novel has changed Dhananjoy’s name] mercy petition, the first hearse of the day had just rolled towards Nimtala Ghat’ (Meera 2014, 1). Though the sense of being in a televised world is introduced early, one should first want to dwell on that perennial state of poverty as it was before its interruption and intervention by the mediascape. For it is only by fully comprehending that complexity of an almost infinite, immemorial family poverty that one can fully appreciate the interventions of state and media in their bizarre conjunction. The novel gives a much longer context to Chetna’s family than was the case in historical actuality—certainly no one could trace Nata Mullick’s family through so many centuries. In the novel, Chetna inherits a task/rite/job that had purportedly been in the family for centuries before the Common Era. The job offers only meagre livelihood but has a sacral character, for it has been assigned to a particular lineage—one with its own myth of origin. The community’s guilt of (judicial/sanctioned) killing is localized in one individual who is given the propitiatory rites to appease that guilt—all this would be true of any traditional community’s imagination of the hangman family. But now, in the 21st century, this tradition is made to intersect with the apparatus of the modern state and the even-more-modern television and reality-show media. Early in the novel, there is a reference to a new government order that notifies that women should be allowed to perform all work that hitherto had only been allotted to men. Chetna’s aged father, the state-appointed hangman, asks that his job be inherited by his daughter, as his only other child, a son, is incapacitated. This is the first break with an ancient male lineage. Having grown up in poverty, Chetna takes up the job, as any government job—however menial or humiliating it may be—remains

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Inlays of Subjectivity

prized for the respectability and financial stability it affords. Her house shared space with a ‘hairdressing saloon, a dirty single room shrine, and a tea shop lined with small earthen cups’ (1). Poverty is inseparable from tradition and pride: ‘Chitpur, where our house stands, was always of the black folk. We have been here for ever so long—long before the Europeans divided Kolkata into White and Black towns, before the Basaks and the Seths set up villages besides the Hooghly’ (1). The theme of prideful poverty is a necessary background to Chetna’s agency—she is not of the homogenized, anonymous poor, and her tradition, if nothing else, will cause her to fashion herself in the new ways of a fast-changing modern world. The hanging itself (a judgment given only in the ‘rarest of the rare’ cases) is to occur after a gap of a decade or so, but is, for the first time, to take place in full view of television spectatorship. The growth of television news media in India from the 1990s is a development that has had an incalculable effect on public consciousness (Rajagopal 2001). K. R. Meera herself was an accomplished journalist before turning novelist. In Hangwoman, the idea of live-telecasting the deliberations around the hanging (and the long run up to that fateful event) has the studios excited—the line between entertainment and news is of course predictably blurred. Many an ambitious television journalist is out to gain exclusive access to Chetna, the unexpectedly young, telegenic, female face of the process. Is it women’s rights or an archaic barbarity, asks the excitable press? In the studios, and among the public, there is growing fascination with the newly- discovered minutiae of hanging. The dark, unaccountable, mysterious interiors of prison can now finally be visualized and brought into the bedrooms and living rooms of the classes who can afford cable news. Time thus has a dual role: there is, on the one hand, the excitement at the prospect of the hanging and, on the other hand, a paradoxical sense of waiting, an impatience to get it all over with. This sense of fissured duration is experienced by all the three key players—the

First Study 11

hangwoman, the accused, and the journalists. To complicate matters, the president might pardon at any point, and make the case for magnanimity and forgiveness; it may be his large heartedness, or he may have been persuaded by the many vocal and influential anti–capital punishment groups. The opaque, arid landscape of the court may also at any time provide mysterious twists and turns of plot. These sudden, disjunctive movements of the narrative have less to do with the abstract questions of substantive justice and more to do with the volatile sites of the courtroom and the media. The tension in these sites further acts as provocation to unexpected relationships. It is in this context that Sanjeev Kumar, a young male television journalist, who is ambitious and charismatic, gains exclusive access to Chetna. From the beginning, it is of course clear that this ‘exclusive story’ may accelerate his career; and as the novel evolves, it is also clear that the libidinal tussle between Chetna and Sanjeev is the core affective knot of the novel. What is the context of Chetna’s life, before and coeval with her romance with the media embodied by Sanjeev Kumar? Ever since her earliest memories, she has been involved with the reality of the noose: a noose that paradoxically (via formal employment) gave life to her family, even as it gave death to others. Some of those dead were likely innocent, and even for those guilty, it is only a truly desperate family that would retain the bleak profession of hanging. Why should one family take on the tangibility of a community’s guilt, the vengefulness of its anger, or the melancholy arguments of hanging as necessary for deterrence? A kinship arises between the to-be-hanged and the hangman, both of whom are beyond society’s pale. Yet, the executioner tries to separate herself from the condemned. One way of doing this is by approaching the question of hanging in a detached, quasi-scientific (and hence, quasi-compassionate) manner of deliberating endlessly on the length and quality of the rope, the weight of the person, on whether the rope may be reused, placing the

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Inlays of Subjectivity

rope between the third and fourth vertebrae, the quickness of action such that the condemned does not feel pain, and so on. The technology of hanging is updated according to the twin goals of minimizing pain and not compromising the dignity of the condemned. An inept hangman will make the condemned flail in the void. Instead, there is the ideal of an un-writhing death that must confirm the efficacy of that last point of human application. Just as the sacrifice of animals at Kalighat in Kolkata requires that the head be cut with a single blow so that there is no pain, the art of the hangman lies in minimizing the moment of the hanging. There is family pride in this. The mother relates an origin myth: Grandfather Bhim … performed the very first animal sacrifice there. … He severed the head in a single blow. That’s how the custom of severing the head of the sacrificial beast in one blow so that it knew no pain in death began at Kalighat. Over time, in place of the [grandfather’s] hut, a concrete temple rose. And the surging Adi Ganga shrank to a little pond, the Kundu Pukur. (235)

Pain is to be reduced to a null point, a vanishing. It is important that the condemned dies of the hanging and not due to an attendant mental shock—the latter would be understood as the legally inadmissible ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ (411). But who is to parse these final causes of death? There are infinite rationalizations of guilt in the novel, and idioms are freely drawn from both secular and religious literature: Chetna reminds herself that the punishment is only death, not death plus suffering, and it is the immediacy of death that absolves both the state and its human representative. If the hangman breaks down, he is liable for prosecution himself (58). It is also declared that the act of hanging fortifies society’s self (239). One learns that the vast majority of Indians, including the youth, favours the death penalty (426). The hangman has a sacred duty, and if he cannot honour it, he is not even

First Study 13

fit to be hanged, leave alone be a hangman (94)! If done perfectly, the hangman’s duty is akin to the command of the sacred text of the Bhagavad Gita (Song of the Lord), whereby it is said that killing done with detachment is not violence at all. Not only is it morally forgivable but sometimes indeed one’s sacred dharma (innermost duty and nature) to kill. It is often repeated that one is but an instrument of the Lord (417). A perfect hanging is rewarded by the audience feeling that it has attended a skilful concert, and it makes them go away ‘light-hearted and happy as if departing after a grand festival’ (117). If justice were vengeful, it should have been decreed that he who has killed a hundred should be hanged a hundred times—but the state hangs only once (183). Repentance will mitigate even if it cannot save, and the lack of repentance on the condemned person’s part eases the hangman’s task and heart (257). The doctor is said to be the complement of the hangman, and the polity needs both arms equally—‘the doctor’s job is to heal even the foe … the hangman’s job is to kill even his own son’ (12). All this extended rhetoric is adroitly managed by the novelist: the rhetoric cannot be entirely separated from humour, comedy, and a terror interlink. The extreme scientificity of the rhetoric (always in the name of compassion) cannot entirely be separated from humour, comedy, and horror—that the ash from the rope can cure illness; that the hangman has to bathe in the Ganga before committing the act (318); that the essential ritual elements were flowers, liquor, and blood (410); and that if you are hanged by the right person, you will go to heaven (182). When human-rights activists remark that the mental health status of the condemned is important, it is asserted that there is no significance of the mental health of someone who is to anyway die (318)! If the house in which they live is wretched, it is matched by the wretchedness of the prison. And just as the house somehow brought out some elemental fierceness in Chetna, so too do the prison yards and the hangman’s room. The prison is bare, free of the noise of the

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Inlays of Subjectivity

street. Chetna responds to this quiet. And it is in this stark, primeval context that there occurs a violent sexual encounter between Sanjeev Kumar and Chetna. Sites such as the prison birth new, confused, tumultuous desires. Chetna, her father, Sanjeev Kumar, and the policeman are in the cellar where the hanging is to take place—they are examining the apparatus of hanging (the oiled levers, the pit with its bones) to make sure that all is in order. Suddenly, Kumar presses the lever and he and Chetna descend into darkness: In that dark hole which reeked of the stench of vile creatures that fed on the shit and piss off the thousands of human beings who had died at the gallows, his hands crushed and mutilated my body. … He bit my lips hard and snarled. He kicked my body, crushing it. … That was the turning point in my story. After that, I did not have the heart to let him off. (76)

The sordid sexual violence only makes Chetna more determined. Her desire for Sanjeev Kumar is less an end in itself than a raw form of her desire for aggrandizement. Seen from Chetna’s eyes, the novel is one of a gigantomachia— and this is the perspective that this first-person narrative intrinsically encourages. But if one, as it were, deliberately slows one’s speed of reading and pays attention to the spaces and psyches that the central momentum of the novel precludes, one can paint a different moral representation. One’s insights need not coincide with Chetna’s: rather, the focus could be on gaining insights into the minutiae of deeply entrenched injustice. The prison is an originary site from which to see both the judge and the condemned, the friend and the enemy, the lover and the violator. The fascination with these locations is that felt injustice creates new and powerful revaluations of subject-hood. The question of injustice strains the frames of traditional realism and provides new shapes of stylized literary invention. The Hangwoman is full of the fantastical and the characters are often hyperbolic

First Study 15

(Chetna with her death-lust, constantly making nooses out of her dupatta, the imagined genealogy of several thousand years, the free wanderings through the several pasts of Indian history). The digressions into myth are also accompanied by digressions into the interior of the image. Chetna stumbles upon strange image-beings throughout the novel—the corpse of a destitute young boy, from whose eyes termites crawl, while blue flies emerge from his ear, red gnats from his mouth, silver-winged moths from his penis. As the boy lies dying, even with a taped chin and jaw, the creatures pour out—if the boy shows any sign of life (a smile, or hunger), the creatures rush back inside (145–6). Chetna refers to termites of memory boring into her brain (404). These images keep erupting throughout the novel, shattering the novel’s dominant mode of realism. The spectral figure of the mutilated brother haunts the book—Chetna sees the invisible twelfth figure in every football team, one with a transparent body and glasslike feet (244). This spectrality—as that of the hangman himself—is a long shadow cast over all of history. To see the neck of the condemned is already to see the play of the pressure of the noose (256). The image of the hangman provides the narrative thread (or noose) that binds, or disjoins, stories linked only by the fate of hanging; the father always slips into memory or rumour or speculation, finding odd similarities between the tales of this or that person he had hanged, or those who had been hanged in earlier centuries. The guillotine generates both its own paranoia and its own secret filiations. The noose being likened to a snake (in turn, likened to the camera) updates a classic image of Indian philosophy—the snake and the rope, the indeterminacy of the real, the sense of stickiness of the still present snake-in-the-rope. The wake of history keeps smudging the present. Action within a Televised Life Inwardness is not a secret place somewhere in me; it is that reverting in which the eminently exterior … forms, as infinity, an exception

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Inlays of Subjectivity

to essence, concerns me and circumscribes me and orders me by my own voice. —Levinas (1991, 147)

Beyond the introspective gatherings (the sense of deprivation and poverty, the mythological genealogy, the rationalizing of her profession), Chetna balances her movement in the world on the symmetric, twin engines of becoming–hangwoman and becoming–media star. Are these becomings, these callings, interior or exterior? The narrative navigates this freshly contemporary moment in Indian history where memory and reality are increasingly represented by reality television news. It is the primacy of this uncertain media wave that inflects her sense of self, family, employment, and monetary opportunity. Are her actions a noose—that is, the long rope—that will save her, or finally hang her on the edge of her own ambition? The skill of the narrative voice (overlapping, but non co-incident, with Chetna’s consciousness) is that it is able to paint the deep affects of deprivation, as well as use those affects to render hollow the elaborate pretensions of the justice and the media systems, that is, the claims of both the justice and the media systems to uphold egalitarian democracy. Chetna’s eye is one that affirms the veil of the emperor’s clothes when it suits her as well as pierces through to see the nakedness beneath to better manipulate it. The idea of agential and chosen action is complicated in the process of sanctioned judicial killing. On the one side, there is the rhetoric of there being no human hand at all, the hand having turned invisible, a robot’s arm that impersonally presses a switch; the process of death has been deeply technologized in many countries. On the other side, there is an undeniable sense that there will always be a final human hand to press the button, to give the injection, just as the voice of the judge or the president remains stubbornly human and agential. The very notion of pardon is agency, and thus human

First Study 17

contingency. In India, the mode of death—hanging—retains the aura of the archaic, and so there persists the visible, tangible human agent. It is the humanity of the executioner/hangman that requires the elaborate rhetoric of legitimacy; this is why there are many claims to the ancient origins of such practices. However abstract the nature of law, the final point of application of pressure is still a delicate set of bones in the throat of the stranger, someone whom one does not have any personal enmity against. And though only one human being does this, there is an inescapable knowledge that that hangman represents each of us citizens. This precarious stranger-hood between the hangman and the condemned—key to the classical concept of justice as blind—is utterly disrupted in the age of mass media. The mutual anonymity of not just the condemned and the hangman but also of their respective families and lawyers is laid ludicrously bare in a 24-hour media culture. Further, there is no end to information and the amount of tears that may be shed in a studio. After a point, the media ends up reporting on its own reporting. Channels become remote from the event and, in mutual competition, become hyper-aware of their competitors’ coverage of those tears and machinations. The media changes everyone’s behaviour, expectations, and thoughts; the elaborate mythology (the myths of origin of these practices that Chetna’s grandmother spins) no longer holds the answers. Media compresses chronology such that it begins to seem to Chetna that she has lived all her life under television lights. Sanjeev Kumar begins to extort her interiority, laying her pornographically bare in the flattened glare of the studio-frame. Her entire past is detached and rearranged into a compacted, single plane—she is reduced to this single, charged, enigmatic identity of hangwoman. Deleuze writes of the inner universe of the studio: ‘These are the paradoxical characteristics of a non-chronological time: the pre-existence of a past in general; the co-existence of all the sheets of the past; and the

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Inlays of Subjectivity

existence of a most contracted degree’ (2005, 96). There is a tug of war between Chetna’s smarts and the predatory eye of the camera. The novel does not want to reduce Chetna’s narrative to melodrama (as victim of poverty); yet, the novel is also careful to construct Chetna’s agency as deriving only from this part-erasure that the camera eye represents. Chetna’s future (and hence her family’s too, as she was to be the sole breadwinner) had always threaded that fine risk between violence and opportunity. Her brother Ramu’s limbs had been hacked by the vengeful father of someone Mullick had hanged. As a child, she was taught to turn dupattas into nooses, the way a flower-seller’s fingers fashion garlands, even in her sleep. Chetna was born the day her father hanged a serial killer, and the umbilical cord formed a perfect noose when she was born—the novel misses no opportunity to mark Chetna as fated to be involved in the business of killing. Her tall and darkly handsome 88-year-old father proudly displays framed newspaper articles of his work in the living room—there are photographs of the 451 people he had hanged. He refers to himself as an artist and scientist, one whom the government should support like it would any other artist or scientist—these were the conversations and values Chetna grew up with. Hanging was always part-theatre, and her father Grddha Mullick was a practitioner and aficionado of all kinds of theatre. Chetna inherits this gift, and this helps her navigate television as the latest iteration of an old performative tradition. Her father had always been adept at playing up the drama of hanging during his youthful days as an amateur actor. She notes: ‘I felt uncertain about him [her father] but also proud. I have never seen an anchor on a TV show like him. Never seen a character like him in the movies or in the theatre’ (6). This disposes her to the lure of the moving image. At the beginning of the novel, there is the sorrow that life was passing them by—the lights of televisions and malls in contrast to their ill-lit one-room

First Study 19

house. But now, the prospect of the hanging brings those lights into their house. From watching television, she finds herself in it—a leap that would have been unimaginable for any other inhabitant of her housing colony. Her relief at the new prospects of her life is both sharp and fragile: they might still lose the fight against retaining capital punishment. She is on television, but not on many types of shows—for example, on the crucial issue of whether to retain capital punishment, she can only watch helplessly (and understand poorly) the big-talking civil rights groups and government officials. Though she and her father were directly involved, their opinion would not be sought—others would speak for them, and imperfectly. There has been much recent scholarship on Indian visual media, especially cinema and all its regional avatars (Jain 2007; Prasad 2014; Vasudevan 2015). Perhaps, less has been written on the role of the media and its techniques of representation and dramatization (Jeffrey 2012). ‘News’ changed dramatically from the 1990s onwards and became increasingly indistinguishable from ‘entertainment’, thus creating the ground for the contemporary controversies of fake news. News began to be shot in the way a film-awards show may be shot (Rajagopal 2009). There would seem to be an undeniable immediacy and soberness to ‘news’, yet it is not as if it is unembellished reality or presented without the intent to provoke. The techniques of news media borrow from films, but the media has a claim to greater veridicality and historical reality. Hence, censorship laws are more stringent against visual media (Bhatia 2016a). The courts recognize both the power of visual media and the difficulty of distinguishing fact from the treatment of the fact. Hangwoman absorbs the figurations of the media and, in turn, pushes novelistic realism to its limits. This extremity is embodied in the rich complexity of Chetna’s youthful voice; that she was born in the era of satellite television gives her a sense of habitation in a technology-saturated world as well as it lends her rawness, energy, and determination.

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The novel does not seek to simply represent a new programme on hanging (‘reality-television’) but is itself inflected in its grammar by the mode of reality-television-newspeak. It has the hustle of late-night news anchors following the ticking-clock rhythm of prime-time television. There is the insuperable temporality of ‘seven days to go, six days to go … [for the hanging]’. No interiorities (of Chetna or her father) stay secret or unmolested from studio illumination. All ideas of privacy have to struggle with the uncompromising pulse of television reality—a reality that, even as it is choreographed and produced, claims to be objectively ‘following the story’. Studios and boardrooms ration citizens’ privacy. The challenge of the novel is, in the eye of the television storm, to yield Chetna some margin, grant some teeth to her voice. The media figures not just in the content of the novel but also in its rhythm and syntax, its gaze and glare; the novel captures the sense of a perennial, hissing camera-snake that stalks all the actors of the drama. There are further derived ideas of framing, cutting, flashbacks, editing style, and other such techniques—the novel translates them from the world of television to that of the novel. A shared, contemporary, public event unfolds across multiple television channels in real time and for a million spectators; perhaps, hanging is only returning to its rightful historical role as a Foucauldian public spectacle and political theatre. The figure of Sanjeev Kumar Mitra literalizes the media—suave on the outside, voracious and all-consuming within. Chetna, from the slums of Nimtala Ghat, stands for the simple, obsessive craft of the perfect noose, a far cry from the urbanity of the media. This is even as the city is said to belong to both. After returning from the studio, Chetna unfailingly catches her programme later on the same night. She enters and exits the screen; traversing it; growing in, within, and through it. It is a world far removed from her poverty and lack of formal education. From where may she make her case for privacy or consent or intelligibility or control? On a visit to her simple dwelling,

First Study 21

Sanjeev Kumar had casually stolen an ancestral gold coin—for no clear reason, presumably just because he could. He had taken footage of her and played it without her consent. She had remarked: ‘I found it hard to forgive him for defiling the secrets of my body with filthy looks and dirty words’ (41). His gaze and words are continuous with the camera eye and tongue. Sanjeev Kumar constantly reminds Chetna of what is and is not in the ‘contract’ of 5,000 rupees that she has signed with his television company. He interprets and reminds her of the contract—the endless litany of what is and is not due— and it seems that all of her and all of her time has somehow been promised. ‘Everything had been bought for a price—my movements, words, experiences. I felt as though a worm had burrowed into my flesh and was squirming inside’ (53). This state of affairs was supposed to persist till the day of the hanging, after which she would be allowed to go back to the ranks of the anonymous poor—unless, by some miracle, she makes such an impact that she can offer a case for her continued ultraviolet existence. The letter of the contract fails before the multiple significations of the hanging. The prospect of the hanging brings up unexpected facets—a heightened, even arguably maddened, sexuality. The novel is notable for the sexual openness of its language; part of its contribution is to insert strong, assertive, female desire into an already loaded political space. To recall the event mentioned before: on the day before the hanging, Chetna and Sanjeev Kumar examine the levers in the gallows-room. Sanjeev Kumar suddenly pulls one of the levers and Chetna is left hanging for a panic-stricken moment. Sanjeev jumps in to ‘save’ her. Hanging is a surrogate sexual act and bathetic comedy, part of a series of faux sexual encounters between Chetna and Sanjeev Kumar, each of which happens in a space that is not the middle-class or lower-middle-class bedroom but a limit-space where desire is inseparable from violation. There is the menace of a predatory, if not entirely non-consensual, desire. Gallows-spaces generate

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affective circuits within the novel—the prison, the pit, but also the television studio, the teak tables of presidential pardons. These spaces are far from the everyday intimacies of the bedroom or the taboos of an average office romance. Chetna remarks that ‘desire and disappointment tormented me in equal measure’ (88). For Chetna, notwithstanding the profane lure of the media, the task of the hanging retains the register of the sacral—perhaps, only the sacral can absorb and absolve solitary human guilt? The convict has to be bathed with water from the Ganga before putting on the handcuffs on the last day. Such ceremony is theatre and rhetoric: in Joseph’s documentary, there are many probing cameras in the tiny pink-walled house of the aged Nata Mullick. The cameras have him, toward the end, literally pinned on his back, the children of the neighbourhood milling around and Mullick remaking that it is members of the press whom he would really like to hang. But even in the midst of such ignominy and powerlessness, he quotes the high rhetoric of the Bhagavad Gita, saying that action is not in his hands, that the soul cannot be killed, and that it is God or the state that is guiding one’s hand. One’s hand may not be one’s own through a self-disciplining of the mind. In contrast, Chetna tries to recover full agency, insisting even on a kinaesthetic thrill that is beyond the simple brute monstrosity of the act. The fantasy of the hanging is indissociable from her desire for Sanjeev Kumar: ‘I burned—and resolved to myself: I will measure out his rope accurately. Not an inch more. Not an inch less. I too want to have him. At least once’ (44). Death and desire are necessarily commingled, available for a dual capture. Chetna also contests the predatory media in her own way, making use of its powers. The media could create its own public–private continuums, often with a touch of the bizarre, due to its freedom to juxtapose disparate worlds. Chetna’s attractiveness to the reader, which allows her to outgrow her social fate, is that she does not disavow any

First Study 23

of the experiences that befall her, howsoever strange or repugnant they may be. Everything is part of the growth of her self. For example, the media arrange a meeting between Chetna and Kokila, the wife of the condemned man (122). They meet in the artificial atmosphere of the studio: ‘The studio with its thousand lights … but none of it was real’ (287). There are rooms at the back for make-up, there is air conditioning, and the behaviour of all who enter that realm alters. This world of air conditioning is entirely new to Chetna, but she is always learning. The mother of the last person hanged had been in the studio for the previous show—she had wailed and foamed at the mouth. This was not least because, as she says later when more composed, the ride to the studio was her first time in a car (130). In the studio, despite its artificiality, everyone feels on stage, aware that they are being microscopically watched by a million unknowing but judging eyes. Chetna is aware of this even when the camera is not on, as if one puts on a new being upon entering the space of the studio. Even before any particular interview, there is a sense of the immemoriality of television within her life—that small black-and-white magic box in her tiny house that had peremptorily opened its world to her, taught her the meaning of new and tangible desires. She tells Sanjeev Kumar: ‘I wish to wander about Kolkata with you, see all the streets and road I’ve seen only on TV with you. I want to experience them with you’ (324). There is a continuity of the two spaces that dominate the book— the studio and the prison. Both are panopticons that abhor secrets, vacuums that insist on being filled. As Foucault writes of all such jumps between epistemological thresholds, ‘What was fundamentally invisible is suddenly offered to the gaze, in a movement of appearance so simple, so immediate, that it seems to be the natural consequence of a more highly developed experience’ (Foucault 2003, 241). Citizens feel themselves in the studio predicting not just events but headlines, acquiring powers of prophecy. When the camera comes

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calling, no one can say no. It arrives for Ramu—Chetna’s physically incapacitated brother—who can do little more than watch football on that same magic-box television: ‘The camera leapt greedily on the bed and, like Kali with her dreadful long tongue, licked him dry’ (248). The camera is often compared to a snake—hissing, licking, poisonous, one that has to be endlessly appeased. When the media talks piteously of Ramu, it raises the price of innocence, the polysemy of abjectness, the pornography of the poverty of Chetna’s world. All tears are grist to their mill, as the lust for news keeps extending in concentric circles from that central binarism—the hangwoman and the condemned. Together, they perform the dance of a dystrophic pirouetting dyad, well aware that their actions only gather meaning from the proximity and imminence of death. Despite its universalization and commodification, and the general artifice and planning of the studio dominion, the television experience claims to be intensely lived, real, and in rich colour. Even though that ‘lived experience’ belongs to other people, the belief is that each individual or family makes it their own, treating television experience as the greater distillation of truth. Everyone changes, as Chetna does too when the camera points at her, and yet, this change is seen as revealing a dormant inner truth. Hitherto, her neighbours were ear cleaners, serial killers, paedophiles, and street-theatre artists. And it is in the intimacy of such crowded housing that television looms large, a soothsayer for the trends of the future. One watches television to be told whether the hangman’s job will be made permanent, or hereditary, or gender-neutral. The object of this debate (Chetna, her father, her family) are not only inaudible but never even asked to speak. Instead, it is the organs of a collectivist democracy—the legislature, the judiciary, the police, civil-rights groups—that will be heard. When she visits the inspector general’s office, a decorous old building, it too seems familiar from the crime melodramas on the television. But though the building is familiar, it is—more unappealingly than

First Study 25

unsurprisingly—full of littered teacups and mineral-water bottles (56). The city is seen in the repetitive rhythm of the daily taxi ride to the studio—this is now her life, a mimicry as well as a parody of the office-going salaried classes. There is little separation of television from life, of what is seen here or attested there. The television also virtualizes her proud family history. The myths no longer slide down the grandmother’s tongue as she sits in her ancient corner of the house. Rather, the grandmother’s history is present today in the simulacrum of a variety of television series (307). Whatever the referent of heroism and glory—ancient India, Buddhism, revolutionary anti-colonialism, and so on—it is television-mediated. It is consumed as avidly and belongs to the same epistemological plane as Ramu insatiably watching his soccer World Cup. History has become television, and there is only the lingering image of this disabled boy watching the muscled footballers of a faraway continent. For Chetna, to conquer this medium is to scale summits far beyond what anyone in her class or genealogy could imagine or understand. The minutiae of her thoughts and actions, multiplied on a million screens, is both the conquering of her fate and a surrendering to it, literalized in her lust and repulsion for Sanjeev Kumar. The novel retains an extraordinary simplicity and harshness through its nearly 500 pages. There can be no distance, or even breathing, from the events of the text. Most of K. R. Meera’s works are sparser and thus, perhaps, more bearable. The control with which the narrative is unpacked is revealed best in the occasional breaks from linear storytelling, in the timing of the reveals. Though there is a fierce female agential consciousness, the novel’s consciousness is not arrayed against a straw masculinity. When men or women show power, they are powerful precisely in a provocative, amoral manner. The flowing intensity of the novel derives from Chetna’s ambition and impatient hustle. Perhaps due to the pervasive presence of the

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visual media, no character in Hangwoman pauses to write—for Chetna, it would seem that writing lives too much in the past, too slowly and too patiently, and would thus arrest growth in the world. In some contrast, Urmila Pawar, in the next study of this book, will take issue with this trade-off between writing and agency: Pawar’s work shows a more restrained attitude, a tempered narrative of empowerment and action. Here, suffering is the occasion for introspection and growth, and growth indeed requires time and patience. The quintessential signpost of growth and moral action is the writing itself, and the presentation, protection, and nurture of that writing in the world. Pawar inherits this notion of suffering and moral action from, among other sources, a long Dalit genealogy—Ambedkar’s autobiographical fragment—as well as other autobiographical voices such as Daya Pawar and Bama. It is these notions of suffering, introspection, writing, and action that will further extend the Hangwoman’s insights regarding felt (in)justice.

Second Study Ambition and Achievement

The self is the non-existent author of a merely fictional autobiography. —Velleman (2006, 204) Orwell says somewhere that no one ever writes the real story of their life. / The real story of a life is the story of its humiliations. / If I wrote that story now– / radioactive to the end of time —Seshadri (2014, 8)

According to the philosopher and historian of ideas Hans-Georg Gadamer, a protagonist’s movement through time and social space is key to the notion of bildung. Derived from bildung is the genre of bildungsroman, the novel of achievements consolidating in the self of the protagonist as she travels through the world, absorbing and converting experience to knowledge and actions that bring worldly success. The complexity of the term ‘bildung’ encompasses cultivation, culture, and formation. For Gadamer, bildung signifies a double movement—the protagonist can only move in time in the world if this Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature. Nikhil Govind, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199498727.003.0002

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movement is accompanied by an inner movement of self-understanding and absorption of the alien-ness of that world. Further, the older idea of bildung as natural form gives this double movement a sense of moral rightness, ownership, and responsibility (and thus not a simple and instrumental self-interest). Bildung is both process and the result of process, and the end result of this self-fashioning is not particularity but representation of a (particular) type. Hence, there has to be a harmonious relation between work, success, capacity, memory, obligation, and desire (Gadamer 2004, 8–17). This study interprets Urmila Pawar’s Aaydan (translated and subtitled as Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs), which may be read as bildung, for it too essentially consists of a chronological account of growth in the world despite adversity. Pawar was born in the difficult circumstance of intense rural caste prejudice, in a situation where there were no clear models of female self-consolidation through writing and speech, or, to put it in Gadamerian terms, no predefined model of determined growth through the absorption of the alien-ness (and indeed hostility) of the world. Through a lifetime of developing the skills of reflection, patience, and truth-telling, Pawar’s memoir conveys what an inclusive citizenship in post-colonial India should consist of. Weave of My Life is arguably India’s most developed and elaborated meditation on Dalit subjectivation. Her memoir embodies a narrative of emergent and empowered selfhood; the final, hard-won insights ultimately retain both power and grit, but also fine delicacy and moral insight. Over time, and through all the trauma and vagaries of childhood and adolescence, home and school, marriage and work, Pawar emerges a resilient survivor who simultaneously increases, in Gadamerian terms, both her fit in the world as well as her self-understanding. Pawar’s original Marathi title Aaydan refers to the weaving of bamboo—something her mother did tirelessly all her life, like millions of women in rural India. It is a dominant image that continually recurs

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in Pawar’s memory—her mother’s flying hands skilfully weaving baskets even as she instructed her many children to do this or that. The Weave of My Life foregrounds this ethic of an active, tempered patience; the bamboo, in addition to becoming a basket, also serves as a traditional signifier of many other meanings: utensil, weapon, livelihood, and therapy. Pawar describes her mother crawling out of the bereavement at the loss of her eldest child, a 20-year-old college student: ‘[The rest of the household was trying to get on with their life by engaging in various chores,] our mother, however, was completely oblivious to these things happening around her. She went on mourning the death of her son, sitting in the courtyard, her fingers frantically, ceaselessly, weaving baskets, winnows, and other stuff, one after another, stricken with suffering’ (Pawar 2008, 27). Pawar links weaving to writing in an ensemble that signifies process, instrument, livelihood, and healing. It is the mother’s unending labour that prepares the ground for the daughter’s position, later in life, as a writer and public intellectual. The daughter’s writerly labour appears at a distance from the mother’s non-literate, manual labour— and yet, over time, the great learning that the protagonist experiences is that notwithstanding the difference, where writing meets weaving is in that perpetuity of patience, of creating a work that has its own austere, sturdy, useful, and honest beauty. Craft, whatever its form, requires endurance in the face of pain, solitude, and even ridicule by the extended family, neighbour, and workmate. There is an essential solitariness and deep bodily interiority from where both joy and labour emerge simultaneously—in Levinas’s words: ‘This body, a sector of an elemental reality, is also what permits taking hold of the world, labouring. To be free is to build a world in which one could be free’ (Levinas 1969, 165). For Pawar, writing is a process of individuated self-consciousness, which she arrives at only gradually. For a long time, like her peers, the idea of intellectual growth was understood in the generic terms

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of becoming more and more Buddhist/Dalit. Pawar sees the conversion from traditional Hinduism as the most significant event of her life (Pawar 2008, x). In her work, there is indeed an organic sense of growth; this gradual growth meant that the true import of many moments is only unveiled over time and through reflection. A tone of live empathy in the memoir processes the harshness of the world, following which comes a detachment, and it is this detachment that is a key aspect of her vision. Pawar writes that ‘the meaning of the transformation began to become clearer to us gradually’ (x). This calm, dispassionate tone is achieved after a long, eventful, and difficult life, full of unexpected twists and setbacks. A detached writing has this dual, simultaneous register—the eventfulness of life as well as a distance from those events. Like the fragments of Ambedkar’s memoirs, one has to do the difficult seemingly contradictory task of grasping both liveliness and detachment, have them oscillate and flow into one another. This detachment is not just temporal (the gap between the moment of the event and the moment of the writing of it) but a gathering of achieved wisdom—a wisdom possible only through undergoing the suffering of that original event. Some of this wisdom is collective, distilled, and made a parable—for example, below is a parable of the horrors of caste in India: Once when I had gone to stay with Akka, a poor couple came to see them from a village called Anaav. They were sitting on their haunches in the veranda. The husband had wrapped a loincloth around his waist. There was a huge gaping wound on his bare back. His wife sat crying, wiping the tears with her torn sari. It seemed that in their village there was a ritual. An upper caste man would inflict a big wound on a Mahar man’s back and his wife had to cover the wound with some cloth and go on walking around, howling! Quite a ritual, that one! Dada, Akka’s husband, was telling them, ‘You have to resist this custom! How can you tolerate it? This ritual is symbolic of some old sacrificial rites!’ The Mahar symbolizes the animal sacrificed. (86)

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Perhaps a community’s ritual is this distilled, banalized wisdom of the recognition of everyday horror. Despite the plea (or the actuality) of resistance, there seems something timeless and primordial about hierarchy in India. In the ritual and narrative above, the truth of the event does not reveal itself immediately, and certainly not to all actors at once. The literary historian Udaya Kumar remarks on how the early Nambutri (a Kerala Brahmin community) ‘autobiographies are turned into an “auto-ethnography” of the past’ (Kumar 2017, 227). Pawar’s text finely delineates the registers—the everyday reality that a child encounters, the moment of recognition of horror, the deeper level of ritual and repetition, Dada’s reclaiming of a common sense from that obscuration of ritual (the insistence on seeing the horror for what it is, the injunction to resist), the inertia of the wounded man who does not rise to resist, and the inertia of all around him who too participate and acquiesce in that degradation. In the tradition of the bildung, there is a patience required for self-understanding, one which finds itself sometimes at odds with the urgency of protest: the wounded man does not respond to Dada as someone who has been newly shown the light as well as the path to action and release. Analogously, Pawar’s narrative and understanding cannot be rushed, and the reader (like the child protagonist) has to register its full weight and import before pursuing thoughtful action. Impatience or the immediacy of outrage leads only to poor understanding, and a greater long-term vulnerability. Pawar notes the subtlety of caste in the prologue: ‘Like wild animals fast disappearing from the woods, caste seems to have “disappeared”. Yet like a wild animal hiding behind a bush, it remains hidden, poised for attack’ (Pawar 2008, xii). Pawar’s growth (in the world and through self-reflection) requires strong components of dispassion and patience as the only grounds for meaningful and successful action. Here is Levinas again: ‘This situation where the consciousness deprived of all freedom of movement maintains a minimal distance from the present, this ultimate

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passivity which nonetheless desperately turns into action and into hope, is patience—the passivity of undergoing, and yet mastery itself ’ (Levinas 1969, 238; italics in original). Pawar gains an insight into caste from that wounded man, one that he may not yet have himself, and so there is a gratitude to that moment for which she cannot repay him except by writing about it and inviting us all (for we are all guilty and complicit) to ponder its full significance. It is the unresolved play of these complexities that gives great pathos to Pawar’s memoir. Though social humiliation persists as an undercurrent, Pawar manages to carve a voice and space of detachment and distance. Apart from all the other burdens, there is the final burden of the many readers who may be upper-caste and ignorant (and thus immoderately curious) of the Dalit life-world. There would be fixed expectations of such readers who may also demand to be chief addressee—it has been their long-standing privilege. There are thus, on the one hand, detailed descriptions of food, rituals, and festivals and, on the other hand, even beyond the content of the text, the critical apparatus of Notes, Introduction, Afterword, and so on. Only by reading these memoirs sympathetically can one both learn from these meta-level notes and yet, not exoticize the voice. One has to learn to read these memoirs in their mode of attempting a larger plural voice as well as in their mode of individuation. There needs to be recognition and empathy for both the quests of belonging and autonomy, institutions and the carving of the self out of those very institutions. One would do well to compare the different moments of individuation and solidarity even within a memoir that is only seemingly univocal. Death and the Family What is that long and complex process that would allow one to respond (that is, take responsibility) for such horror as the above-mentioned

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ritual of the man with the wound on his back? Such a question cannot be answered directly. Instead, Pawar recounts the incident as one episode that contributes in its own way to the bildung idea of the growth of the protagonist—a movement from the inherited dogmas of the village to a questioning, self-reflexive, public platform; a journey from ignorance to freedom. There is the Gadamerian simultaneity of inner and outer, of the world and the self. The memoir is subtitled A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs, and a memoir highlights the idea of a past— moreover, a past that is selected, arranged, interpreted, and evaluated. The raw chaos of trauma (collective, witnessed, or individual) has been purified into meaning and teaching. The trauma is not a single event but many events and responses, and often trauma is recognized as trauma only much later. The string of episodes in the memoir reveals the many dimensions of suffering, traversing personal growth as well as the historical evolution of India’s post-colonial polity. The ritual of the man with the wounded back reveals that the originary trauma long precedes one’s biological life and is part of an immemorial order of Indian sociality. This is why it is a long time before the protagonist announces herself in her own narrative. Though she keeps making brief thumbnail appearances, sustained paragraphs about herself begin more than sixty pages into the book. There is a primordiality to her early life that is best explicated through the sense of belonging to a community deeply marked by long, hard, back-breaking, and largely unrecognized labour—the first section of the memoir consists of Pawar’s memory of accompanying the women of her village as they go up and down distant hills and shallow rivers, often in monsoon rain, to the city to sell their produce (firewood, semolina, and mangos). There is a gap between the exhaustion of that barefoot journey and the leisured, humorous storytelling style of the adult narrator. The journey is a time of gossip, grievance, and danger (from snakes, tigers, and exhibitionists). Though it is a hard life, Pawar does not give us a sense that she felt an urgency

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to grow up and flee, or to individuate her voice from the voices of those happily gossiping women. There is instead a sense of the high moral sensibility of these women and a sense of gratitude to them for their courageous ownership of their life. Pawar describes the shades of their rich voices as they go up and down the hills: promises and threats to children or drunk husbands, complaints to friends, and easy bawdy talk amongst themselves. It is a world where physical labour is intrinsically intermixed with everything else (parents and siblings, livelihood, caste, and food). This hard life is described in a slow tempo of visual imagery—there are detailed descriptions of catching various kinds of fish from rivulets in the hills, of theatre at night in the light of stars and the petromax, and of throaty songs and rituals, many of them consisting of subtexts that were actually demeaning to the Mahars (this is even as Mahar labour was required in all the preparations for upper-caste ritual). By the time the narrative begins to carve out a sense of individuation, much of the family and village context has been indelibly set— the father is no more; the mother has to work tirelessly to support the family; there is very little land, but the relatives are attempting to steal even that from the mother; there are the tragedies of the death of an elder brother and the suicide of a grandfather. It is a difficult life—both financially and in terms of numerous family crises such as illness and death. At one level, the narrator does not dwell much on these difficult deaths—the grandfather’s death takes up a page, and the next page contains the brother’s death. Pawar is around seven or eight at the time of these events. Yet, a closer reading reveals different dynamics that will play a larger role in the narrative. The grandfather (her mother’s father), for example, had come to the house unannounced: ‘He was clearly quite disturbed. When my mother asked him repeatedly about the reason for his distress, he complained that his daughters-in-law did not give him food to eat, or hot water for his bath; that his sons did not speak to him with respect. Then he

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burst into tears’ (Pawar 2008, 5). That night, he hangs himself from a peepal tree. Unfortunately, and not unexpectedly, such family tragedies only begin with death. For what followed soon after was guilt and blame. Pawar’s mother was, unsurprisingly, blamed for the suicide and for ‘deliberately not informing them about his mental imbalance. My mother was in a state of shock for a long time’ (26). This is the first ‘unnatural death’, to use the police terminology, but there were to be many more in Pawar’s life. Though Pawar is so young, there is an awakening of the sense of the inexplicability of strangeness and evil in the world. Even though Pawar feels some sense of progress and control later in life when she becomes a prominent public figure, these many deaths (of which the grandfather is only a harbinger) that litter the narrative always manage to derail and unhinge her poise. The representation of the mourning and healing that follows is indirect and circumspect, fraught with silence, guilt, blame, anger, and so on. Each death is unique in the signature of sorrow that follows in the minds of the many people related to that dead person. Pawar’s description of the toll and affect of these deaths is oblique: her elder brother’s death by illness is represented by the grief-stricken workaholism of the mother as well as the absolute change in her mother’s appearance: My mother’s usual appearance: her tall slim frame, light complexion that had the glow of wheat, thin long face, blood red kumkum on a green tattoo mark on her forehead, the mangalsutra around her neck, woven in ordinary thread, a few green glass bangles around her wrists and the khut khut noise made by the thick silver toe ring on her feet … gradually dissolved in my memory to be replaced by another image of a tear-stained thin, bare face without the red kumkum mark … and a thin, skin-and-bones body withered in grief. (28)

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The most upsetting death of all, and one that bookends this unnatural death of the grandfather, is the suicide of her college-going son. This death of the child is repeated as a narrative trope—her mother loses her eldest son, and Pawar was to also lose her eldest son Mandar to suicide. Pawar remembers: Once I had asked her [mother] what exactly it meant to be a mother. I just wanted to know how she would express her feelings behind the word ‘mother’. My question made her wince with pain. She said, ‘To be a mother is to commit sati, to immolate oneself; nothing less!’ Aai [mother] had suffered that agony! Today, I was standing on the same pyre of pain. (298)

To love as mother is to be infinitely vulnerable to pain. Levinas writes of the uniquely persistent trauma of the maternal at losing its own flesh, its own body: ‘The subjectivity of sensibility, taken as incarnation, is an abandon without return, maternity, a body suffering for another, the body as passivity and renouncement, a pure undergoing’ (Levinas 1991, 79). However, there are ways and means of slow healing, of a return to the world. Like for her mother, it is work (rather than the platitudinous solicitude of relatives) that opens the door and lets in fresh air. Pawar begins to translate stories and homilies of the Buddha, and the echo of that ancient wisdom keeps up her spirit and faith. Healing of course does not preclude the persistence of suffering: ‘When the tragedy struck, my grief and agony knew no bounds! It engulfed me completely, like boiling lava out of an exploding volcano, reducing all my emotions, enthusiasm, plans, and hopes to a head of charred ashes’ (Pawar 2008, 296). But the genre of memoir/memory is this relation of work to suffering, of the movement from the separation through death back to a renewed sociality with the living. For Pawar, her son’s death recapitulated in the most virulent form all the other deaths in the family—the grandfather, as also two other brothers. Any life is susceptible to that midnight

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telegram, to the faces and voices of relatives as they come to tell the news of the unspeakable. There is a deep sense of dispensability, substitutability, and guilt—why them and not me? This is compounded by the fact that such deaths often do not arrive in a pure form. One of her brothers committed suicide due to his feeling that he was being thought of as a corrupt government officer. His last letter was addressed to his mother, for he presumably felt that she alone would think him innocent. In Mandar’s case, there was already a prior unhappiness. It is well known that caste prejudice is rife in Indian colleges, and that this often led to self-harm (Newman and Thorat 2012). The sense of the underlying inegalitarianism of professional colleges no doubt contributed much to his attenuating sense of self-worth. But the enemies are not all external. Mandar had been an excellent student for much of his life but found college both difficult and uninspiring. Pawar’s husband was not entirely sympathetic to his guitar-playing son, insisting that he work harder as his parents had sacrificed so much for him. Her son’s death is linked to a whole skein of parental issues that are impossible to morally disambiguate: the son had wanted to change colleges, to which the father had replied that he (the son) would do better if he did not ‘while away [your] time playing the guitar. You may be getting prizes for that but is it going to help you in college? You must study hard. Don’t give me flimsy excuses’ (300). The son had indeed won a scholarship the previous year and had always been a successful student, even getting a seat in a prized medical college. But he seems to have run into trouble immediately— Pawar merely remarks: ‘The first year had been quite stressful’ (301). Students from Dalit backgrounds face an extraordinarily difficult, and often hostile, reception from upper-caste students in professional colleges as the latter feel that the Dalit student has come there unfairly and with lower grades. The narrator attests to this, for one of her friends’ husband taught in that college and had spoken of

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the ‘anti-reservation’ atmosphere there (301). Pawar had told her husband that perhaps their son should be allowed to enquire into shifting to another college. But the father repeated his stance, and then, his mental health surely exacerbated by the atmosphere, Mandar took that final, fatal step. The sense of social unfairness was now pervasive. Pawar remarks that the ‘opposition [is] on all levels. … My brother had ended his life out of frustration and now my son had chosen the same path’ (301). The arguments between father and son had immediately preceded Mandar’s death, and it is unsurprising that Pawar’s husband took to drinking even more. Pawar grew closer to her mother: ‘But now this agony of the loss of a child brought us together once again. She had drowned her grief in endlessly weaving aaydans. I could see her constantly flying over the weave. For me writing was the only solace’ (304). There is a new respect that Pawar has for her mother’s resilience and a new solidarity in shared grief. Grief and loss (and their slow mitigation) provide a deep inner structure of cyclicity in the book. Pawar brings out her first volume of short stories shortly after the son’s death. What travels between generations is the rediscovery of the parent–child bond—a parent becomes parent only in learning to teach healing and grief, in the kinship that results from shared sorrow, and in the learning to look outward and return to the world of the living through patient work. After the death of her son, Pawar’s mother had stopped believing in the older gods—those idols were now given away. It was only the ceaselessness of work that was her healing and faith. Though Pawar’s relation with her mother is the strongest bond in the book (she writes that she even looked identical to her), she is equally formed by a boldness in her romantic and sexual life. This carving out of a romantic self takes place against many odds, for in the rural world into which she was born, there were hardly any models for self-determination. As the youngest child, she was

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susceptible to always being told what to do. If she did not comply, she was beaten by everyone, including her mother, siblings, and the teachers at school (64). Despite this, one of her earliest traits was an uncommon curiosity about the nature of the social world. For example, the dullness of the village-school caused her to seek more exciting adventures outside. She often went to the Maruti temple instead of the school, observing the nomadic Komti people whose children played in the temple courtyard. She was fascinated by these different groups, the attendant social rules prohibiting the sharing of water or wells in schools and temples, as well as the ‘marblefaced sweet smiling’ priest of the Maruti temple (66). But one day, the priest did not come out to give the prasad, and ‘after a long time the door opened and a Komti girl called Ulgawwa came out, her face wet with tears’ (66). Like the many events of trauma in the book, and though the incident stayed alive in a corner of Pawar’s mind, it is largely glided over—this attitude is perhaps understandable in the context of the pervasiveness of such incidents, and the lack of anyone willing to discuss such matters with young women. Despite the confusion, some years later, by the eighth standard, Pawar soon enough finds herself ‘repeatedly turning to look at the boys in my class. I blushed without reason. The silly boys of yesteryears with runny noses and shorts that threatened to slip off, had suddenly blossomed into school heroes in nice teri-cot uniforms’ (121). There was stealth and teasing, coy exchanges of notebooks, and attempts to shine and impress in all the cultural and sports programmes at school. Boys of the family and the community came home more often, promising berries, champak, and tamarind. The ubiquitous abuse remained amongst her friends—stepbrothers ‘sitting’ on the stomach, an uncle ‘playing dolls with me and pretends to be my husband, drags me into an alcove and presses me hard’ (125). Ignorance sharpened sexual anxiety—can a man’s touch, or his offering of a flower or leaf bowl, make one pregnant? Her mother

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watched her as much as she could, and when Pawar snuck away, her guilt precluded her telling her mother whom she had spent time with. Biology lessons gave her more knowledge than her mother had, and it was with peers that the amalgam of romantic and sexual desires was animatedly debated. Wasn’t there more nobility in unrequited love? In this ferment, at sixteen, she meets Harischandra, a family friend and the man she would eventually marry. For all that fervent desire, she had little experience, and Harishchandra won her over with his ability to endlessly talk with her and the obviousness and openness of his attraction to her. She felt safe to explore her sexuality, even if only in the modest manner of using risqué language, for which she was happy to blush (as was deemed appropriate in the romantic Marathi novels she had begun reading). There were trysts in the local scenic and historical spots, and comic moments in how they outwitted her concerned mother and siblings. The family was unhappy with her choice as they felt she could do better—he was an ‘SSC pass and only a simple clerk’ at the post office, and she had been doing well in school (132). They had more ambitions for her. Her brothers were to chaperone her, to which they assented in a manner sometimes grumbling, sometimes threatening. She becomes closer to Harishchandra, as he copes with the accidental death of a friend, and learns to be sympathetic of his difficult life in the city where caste prejudice was widely prevalent—for example, on social occasions, even those junior in the workplace would be given a higher status in the homes of colleagues (159). Pawar appreciated that Harishchandra came from a family where there was already much political consciousness—his father had refused to do work that was associated with his caste, even though this decision came at great economic cost. Later, due to Harishchandra having to take up a job, his college education was disrupted. She is thus more considerate to him than other, more culturally literate or economically stable men who courted her. She preferred writing long letters to Harishchandra

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in bookish English. Being separated from him was hard: ‘His smile, his loving gaze, his speech. … At that time he used to wear a cotton bud dipped in majma, a popular scent, in his ears … even today his scent breathes new life into the memories of those days’ (168). When she manages a coveted job, he comes with his family and formally proposes, and they have a wedding where she does not pay either for dowry or the ceremony. The wedding is performed in the Buddhist format, in front of a small family of thirteen close relatives. Pawar’s memories of the day are happy and warm—as was the custom, she changes her name from Vimal to Urmila, the latter being a name she chooses for herself. It is thus a romance whose sweetness lay in its mundanity, in the modesty of its small stratagems and deceptions against a mother who was not too keen on this particular match. Harishchandra is a cheerful companion during the uninspiring days of her high school and early jobs. In line with the memoir as a whole, Pawar’s resistance to family and social norms seems restrained in both the temporal registers—the time of the event as well as the time of the dispassionate recounting. There is an ineluctable pathos in all this: through her premeditated resistances, she does achieve, against the family’s wishes, a marriage for love. And yet, it was to be a strained and unhappy marriage from its earliest beginnings. There was little privacy in the initial months of the marriage, and there occurred some inevitable domestic tensions between her and the parents-in-law. Though she felt secure, the romantic note quickly waned, and the rhetoric of traditional family mores make a strong comeback in her psyche: ‘Yet, a sentence Aai had said once had made a deep impression on my mind. “If the husband calls you a whore, the whole world is ready to sleep with you.” So, I was absolutely sure that I wanted to have good relations with my husband. At any cost!’ (194–5). This sentiment of surrender, despite its self-awareness, extends from sexuality to livelihood: ‘Before my marriage, I used to hand over my salary to

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my mother. Now I started handing it over to my husband. If this is not deliberately offering your head for the butcher’s knife, what else is it?’ (208). She does not feel the expected euphoria when she learns that she is pregnant, and feels only an increased anxiety when her mother prays that the child be male. In light of the son’s later suicide, this is only more tragic. Pawar’s self-fashioning increasingly begins to be defined against the expectations and duties vis-à-vis the family. The reasons ironically lead back to what her own family had correctly intuited—that her cultural and intellectual interests were far ahead of her sports-loving husband. Harishchandra begins to resent her prominence as she moved up the ranks of literary fame, for, despite his redeeming characteristics, Harishchandra turns out to be on the whole, ill-tempered, unhelpful, and resentful of the time that she spends with others and away from him. There is a particular keenness to the humiliations of her marriage, especially when she had fought with the family and insisted on the marriage—she is unable to confess her difficulties even to those in the extended family she was close to. Pawar pointedly contrasts her ambition with that of her more conventional husband’s, pointing out the key source of their mismatch: ‘He was never obsessed by the will to do something! That was his weak point. I often pointed this out to him while countering his verbal attacks on me’ (236). He, in turn, insisted that she prioritize cooking and child-rearing over college degrees and literary writing (236). Inspired by the many women who commuted long hours from nearby towns to Bombay for their work, Pawar managed both chores and education. But all this made Harishchandra only more irritable, to which she exasperatedly replied: ‘I take good care of their food, studies, and all the household work. Besides, I work in the office as well. … It is you who need to pay more attention to the house now. Instead of going to the bar, why don’t you come home early and pay some attention to their studies?’ (240–1). His behaviour does not change, and she too stays defiant.

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They mournfully begin to accept the finality of their difference of views: ‘Gradually, it became clear to me that everything that gave me an independent identity—my writing, which was getting published, my education, my participation in public programmes—irritated Mr Pawar to no end. … He would tell me, “Look at the village woman. The husband’s wish is law for her”’ (246). Their last quarrel was his anger at his wife for supporting their daughter Malavika in marrying someone outside of their community. Distilling a lifetime of frustration and rage, he says: ‘This woman [his wife] has ruined my family. Because of her, I lost face in the community! She considers herself so intelligent! … She is selfish, useless, shameless.’ His anger found expression in these and many other filthier (sic) words (309). It is an episode that brings together so many strands of the memoir. Pawar had managed to stand by many of her strongly held convictions throughout her life—the first was to support her daughter in her choice of partner, and later to also disagree with many aspects of the decision the daughter took. Pawar herself could not attend the wedding for the ‘fear of being forced to do kanyadan’—a Hindu ritual that offended her as both a woman and a Dalit Buddhist (310). Besides, this ‘love marriage’, in the contemporary and colloquial sense of the term, was not quite in line with Pawar’s sensibility—though she believed in an empowered Dalit community, her stand did require belief in a sense of localized community with its own strong boundaries between inside and outside persons. In this case, the groom was caste-appropriate but from distant Uttar Pradesh! The daughter had also broken her engagement to an earlier fiancé at the wedding hall—for all this, again, Pawar was criticized for paying more attention to social work than her family’s poor judgments. The family of the thwarted fiancé then demanded that Pawar’s younger daughter marry the groom—this daughter of course refused and Pawar had to support her too, again in some defiance of convention. Pawar had to manage this taxing family

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situation—soon enough, her family was ostracized by many, and she received ever more invective from her husband. The idea that anyone could fall in love with anyone and should be allowed to marry that person was discomfiting and perhaps somewhat unintelligible to her—though her marriage to Harishchandra was unconventional, he had been a close family friend. But in light of all the family tragedies (her unhappy marital life, the death of the son), Pawar supports her daughters’ choices, trusting that a larger, happier fate would be available to them. The boldness of her personal romantic life comes full circle—the daughters inherit her legacy and take it a firm step further, just as she had taken a step further vis-à-vis her mother. The quarrel over the daughter’s marriage is the last confrontation with the husband—he was to die of cirrhosis of the liver (Pawar mentions his substance abuse often enough). She had decided not to tell the husband of his impending, inevitable death. In terms of the freewheeling blame that is central to the playbook of the Indian family, Pawar again gets blamed (including by her husband) for being insufficiently attentive to his illness and always concentrating on her own public and literary career. She blocks out the tirade and instead, tries to remember her happier moments with him—their long marriage, her memories of the shy sportsman turning father, and of his struggle to cope with the demands of the world. The brutalization of Dalit masculinity is only now beginning to be fully explored through the powerful works of women such as Malika Amar Sheik, wife of the poet-icon Namdeo Dhasal (Shaikh 2016). Urmila’s husband’s death is described movingly: Suddenly one day, Harishchandra said, ‘I want to go to our village … I am feeling bored here. Let us go.’ Startled, I stared at him. Did he know the end is near? But he appeared to be calm. We took the Konkan railway and reached the village. Harishchandra suggested going for a walk. I remembered the days after our marriage. Everything was the same. People in the fields, burning the soil, preparing it for

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sowing, stopped working and talked to us, as they had done at the time. Harishchandra stopped near the stones, telling stories about his mother, about her patting dung cakes, just like he had done then! (Pawar 2008, 316)

His death ends the book—Pawar’s mother had died a little earlier, soon after the son Mandar. In contrast to the normative bildung ending of success and love, this journey ends here instead with the death of many loved ones. The Writer’s Public The plot of proximity and communication … is the risky uncovering of oneself, in sincerity, the breaking up of inwardness and the abandon of all shelter, the exposure to traumas, to vulnerability. —Levinas (1991, 48) Claudia Tate has lamented what she sees as a programmatic response to African–American fiction that draws all its energies from clearly limned categories of racial oppression and struggles for social justice. Such a subordination of the psychic to the social, she proposes, fails to do justice to the aspects of black texts that do not lend themselves to such political recuperation: representations of confused and contradictory desires, enigmatic swirls of emotion, and anti-social or self-destructive longings. —Felski (2008, 128–9)

The classical bildung has the idea of a linear, optimistic self, one that constantly learns from adversity. The learning and mastery have to, at least provisionally, transcend the constant undercutting of that self-growth by the forces of trauma, humiliation, or negative affect. There is no easy way to summate, to consolidate a self—it is not that the mastery finally achieves stability, or that the trauma finally undermines it. Rather than the simple upward graph of linearity and experience and knowledge accumulation, there are also the caves

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and recesses where one burrows to lick one’s wounds. The narrative is poised on the razor, the control of the craft of living and working. To decipher achievement in these folds requires a certain type of reading attention, an attention that can inhabit more fully even those recesses whereby the growth may be temporarily dormant. As a prominent scholar of literary subalternity, Wakankar notes with regard to reading Dalit texts: It implies an insight into the violence inflicted on the Dalit alone; but it also entails a mode of affirmation, a form of belief that embraces the world in its tenderness. If the previous comportment is one of scepticism and suspicion (it is an insight into the abyssal nature of violence), the latter is a stance of joy and discovery (it is an insight into divinity). (2010, 8)

It is a long time before Pawar comes into such wisdom. There is a long life of confused, inchoate striving. Though the mode of narrative is retrospective, one is not sure that the way Pawar painted the scenes of her childhood was in fact similar to the way she felt when she was a child. It would seem that the more distanced approach would likely be quite different from the rawer traumas that the child experienced (deaths of fathers and siblings, poverty, and a sense of the pervasive injustice of social orders in the school and the larger rural community). Thus, one reads a tone of dispassion that was likely disjunct from the actual experience—or rather, that the experience of trauma had to be processed before it could be spread out as a smoothened, gently refined narrative. It is hard to emerge from the shell of caste—not only the family but even school, far from being a place of neutral education, is a place where caste-anxieties and angers simmer. Everyone is aware of the other’s caste and, in Pawar’s world, the teachers use caste-terms easily, often saying that it was typical of a particular caste to behave in a particular way. The adult world easily steeps into classrooms—institutions

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were never caste-neutral. The temple, the school, the panchayat office, and the bus stop would all be in the upper-caste areas of the village. The Dalit writer Bama has written of how, in school, all the Dalit children often had to stand up and be counted—the reason given may be that it is for the sake of some additional scholarship, but it often felt humiliating to be thus exposed (Bama 2014). All higher administrative roles in these institutions were in the hands of the upper castes. Because caste is not visually marked like race, it became a source of a more abstracted, imminent pain—the pain of being found out, of being caught. The faces of people who were not sure they recognized you were full of the unasked question of which caste you were from. Bama was often asked to move away from her seat in a bus. She would sit tight. Her mother would tell her to simply claim that she was from an upper caste. But Bama would wonder why she had to pretend. A search for selfhood has to surmount this continual denial of who you are. It was a wearying fight, and Bama often wondered at her own reasons for such obstinacy (Bama 2014). For Pawar (as indeed for Bama), writing is thus not only the result of that purification of pain and obstinacy, it is also the process whereby that distillation is achieved. Pawar’s memoir directly thematizes writing as intrinsically contributing to growth and fulfilment. The prominent political scientist Gopal Guru has further nuanced the characterization of the writing self in his Afterword to the Dalit writer Baby Kamble’s autobiography The Prisons We Broke (Guru 2008, 158–71). Guru thinks the term ‘testimony’ for this process of purification is overly derivative from legal phraseology—an implication is that testimonial (subsidiary) evidence is subservient to the final judgment. For Guru, it would be more salient to use it in the sense of protest, with an address that goes beyond any imminent judgment. He says that ‘testimonies and autobiographies [can be used in] an interchangeable manner, in as much as both these genres involve the conception of a narrative self ’ (160).

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Scholarship on the memoir has long discussed what it takes to discover an individuated writerly voice—the first important discussion on Pawar’s sense of being a writer happens very late (around two-thirds) into the book. It was in a training programme in her office where she feels she had nothing to learn, and thus suddenly experiences a sense of outspread time. There is a spontaneous onrush of writing, whose origins and imperative force were mysterious: There was hardly any encouragement [to write] as such from the home front, nor was there a tradition in the family of pursuing an activity such as this. So it must have been the good remarks I received in the school for my essays that encouraged me to pick up the pen and write! … I felt a terrible restlessness growing inside me which refused to let me sit quiet. My own experiences, those of my friends and other women, that of living in the village, casteism, being a woman, built up a pressure inside me! Every morning … I wrote stories. (Pawar 2008, 226)

By then she had cultivated enough people in the literary world and so, could enter it relatively easily. Exciting discussions on the minutiae and craft of writing followed. Some advised her to begin with the end—an advice she found rather helpful as she used to get knotted about plot and character. She began to survey the landscape—the highbrow and middlebrow magazines, as well as the prestigious highbrow column that was sometimes to be found in a lowbrow magazine. She grew giddily obsessed due to the prompt validation from those around her: ‘I began to write. I would write anywhere, sitting in the office, travelling in the bus or train, waiting at the bus stop, even standing in a queue. I scribbled furiously’ (228). In a city such as Bombay, where much life is spent in the public spaces due to the long commutes required, she finds her writing looked at in odd ways by fellow travellers—curious strangers peer over at her work even as she struggles to write in a moving vehicle. So absorbed is she that she

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often misses her stop and has to pay a fine for the extra travel. These experiences further nurture the writer in her—it is seamless with the outer world, and she does not seem to need the initial isolating experience of introspection. Is solitude possible anyway in the spartan Bombay housing? At home, for privacy, she writes in the kitchen, and also late into the night after everyone has slept, determined to keep at it in spite of the day’s exorbitant fatigue. As the obsession begins to bother Harishchandra, she begins to increasingly do it in secret—after he sleeps, before he gets up, when he is away: ‘Many a time, I would write in the dark. I would keep a pen and papers near the pillow and write whatever came to my mind even in the dark. I did not want to forget and forego’ (228). Even the last paragraph of the book ends with the following note on herself: ‘A married woman who tried to negotiate her married life like a trapeze artist, fighting off her fears with her pen, trying to forge a way ahead. This aaydan of my life and its weave’ (320). Through her writing Pawar, slowly and painfully over time, crafts a world view regarding her place in the world. Through writing and thinking, there is an increasing confidence in her sense of citizenship, which leads her to different kinds of caste and feminist activism. Pawar carves her voice from this union of thought and action. She remoulds many selves (wife, mother, sibling, worker) under the aegis of writing as a primary mode of moral action. It helps her negotiate the hostility and indifference of the world. As the philosopher, Reiner Schurmann notes: Something in us, to be sure, applauds when, with resignation, we are told that evil is a special problem indeed. Were it not, it would be everywhere—a thought more difficult still to resign oneself to, unbearable. But something in us agrees that the ‘problem’ in question does not belong in any discipline of knowledge, as the problem of motion in physics and as the study of insects does in entomology. (Schurmann 2003, 623)

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Over time, even powerful negative emotions such as anger, shame, and injustice only lead to a determination to stabilize herself, to use as material (even if negative material) for further growth. Pawar realizes that knowledge had brought power to an entire generation of senior Dalit activists. A more positive social ambition could be birthed for all—Dalits and upper castes—a more concrete sense of the importance of public citizenship and meaningful moral action. She begins to understand the broader historical view of her life as emerging from generations of anonymous foremothers. This further motivates her to become involved in an unprecedented and widely acclaimed project to unearth the voices of women Dalit activists of Ambedkar’s time (the 1920s to the 1950s). Writing leads to further unexpected gifts—she begins to be called to speak in public. It does not seem to have occurred to Pawar that public speaking just may be at odds with the solitariness of writing. She has more trouble with public talks that require literary storytelling—she is more comfortable with simple, declaratory speeches. But she is determined to learn the skills required for all occasions and modes. She begins to excel in many genres of public speech, and all this fortuitously feeds back into her writing. The craft of writing begins to frame new questions for her: some occasions and stories demand the first person, some the third, and some may need to oscillate between the two. Questions of craftsmanship and perspective animate many genres of her speech—on radio, for television, and in panel discussions. She becomes a participant in the world of literary scholarship—powerful autobiographical works such as Daya Pawar’s Baluta, first published in 1978, had begun to break open the world of conventional Indian social realism by asking questions of the affective subject (embedded in family and masculinity) in a manner that the form of the traditional working-class novel could no longer sustain (229). The powerful, angry, and self-critical voice of Daya Pawar (bearing no relation to Urmila) is certainly an influence

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on her memoir—though it may be said that the dispassion of Pawar is in counterpoint to Daya Pawar’s more open expressions of frustration and rage. A lifetime of self-examination prepares Urmila Pawar for a more fluid management of affect—to have the inner and the outer world in a smoother synchronization, feeding and enhancing each other, shaping each other into manageable bits. As the philosopher Henri Bergson remarked in his recipe for the classical bildung: ‘An inner life with well-distinguished moments and with clearly characterized states will answer better the requirements of social life’ (2014, 934). This fidelity to the form of the bildung is also why Pawar may have been less interested in the influential formalist experimentations that held Marathi literature in thrall in the 1950s and 1960s—the oeuvre of B. S. Mardhekar being the prime example. Pawar is appreciative of the confidence of these techniques but distances her work from these experimental stories where everything ‘appears to hang in a vacuum of fantasy’ (231). But Pawar is open to the wonderment of these techniques, and their exemplars, and her writing has none of the insularity of a stubborn and mechanical commitment to notions of collective or social realism. Her literary friendships enable her to meet many men and women, to travel, to receive respect in her workspace at a time (the 1970s) when there was a growing resentment at the alleged privileges the Scheduled Castes received. Pawar, undeterred, continues her publications, education, and community mobilizations. She avers that ‘education is that nectar which once tasted makes you feel thirstier still! I was intoxicated with the study of literature; the poems and the stories!’ (240). Vice chancellors felicitate her, and senior university faculty begin to ask her how she came to live a life so profoundly different from anything that her destiny might have marked for her? The public self here is in-mixed entirely with the private self, and though there is the occasional sense of besiegement and lack of privacy, there are also the respites of humour and optimistic

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faith that it was all for a good cause. Pawar testifies: ‘I had discovered my voice at last!’ (260). It is writing and reading (about ‘rationalism, humanism … and the distinction between suffering born out of natural causes and those caused by man-made artificial factors’) that mediate the public and the private (260). Her fellow caste-mates, women activists, and litterateurs also look at her evolution with pride. Pawar is attracted, especially from the 1970s onwards, to the claim of the women’s movement to speak a non-sectarian and universal language of equality, solicitousness, and everyday kindness—one that simultaneously demands personal and intellectual growth. There is an increasing joy and self-confidence in the different socialities she was fashioning with her work and writing. Unlike her husband, who had been mesmerized on hearing Ambedkar in his youth, but whose life had not altered fundamentally, Pawar becomes much more surefootedly involved in contemporary politics, even as it profoundly changes her. Though it would seem that all this took Pawar to heights beyond anything that her childhood might have predicted, the memoir repeatedly insists that it carries all the traces associated with that older form of labour and conscientiousness that her mother exemplified. Far from de-linking writing from that physical labour, Pawar insists that it is the older labour that serves as her impetus and compass. Pawar is continually aware of this deeper connection, as well as the guilt and loss of identity that must accrue if writing dissociates her from her childhood, family, and caste origins. Many of her peers still laboured entirely in that rural world. Pawar links this labour to her mother by remembering that it was the mother’s work that healed them all from the sorrow of the death of their sons, that it was labour that kept alive the space of their home, and that labour was a morality that made them continuous and harmonious with both the elemental and the social world. What emerges as writing is that sense of continuous debt to that conscientiousness, even as writing

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might claim a greater durability. In the village, labour—especially in the social conditions of dominance—does not leave a trace. The poor mother could barely save money and so, no trace of her survives in the world—the basket is sold and she knows no more of it, it is lost to her forever. She has to move on to the next basket, which too will suffer the same fate. The consumer consumes and annihilates. In the villages, no monuments or gardens exist of the Dalit self beyond the mere fact of day-to-day survival. The hand has been used as a machine, and the most frequently mentioned body-part other than the hand is the stomach—much of Pawar’s childhood was spent in frequent hunger, especially after the long walks over the hills to the market. In contradiction to the works of the hand and the mouth, the work of writing endures, it mirrors the world without being usurped by it, it has a freedom beyond the eyes and the purchasing power of the dominant classes. This resilience marks the women in the memoir: Pawar, her mother, her sisters, her two daughters—who by the end of the memoir are happily married. It is the men who often cannot cope and come to unnatural ends—death by suicides, accidents, and substance abuse. Just as she learns from the great public and historical events of the day, Pawar also learns from nearer home, from the many unfortunate events in her family. Her sister (Tai) had married an educated man, even one involved with progressive political causes, such as campaigning for Scheduled Caste candidates in elections (144). However, the marriage turns out to be a strained one and they eventually separate—for, in what unfortunately seems common enough, his progressive politics in the neighbourhood and the public sphere did not necessarily translate into progressive thinking at home. As an allegory of the desire to escape, to be upwardly mobile, to be part of a wider world, and the crushing of all of this, Tai’s case is poignant. Pawar has to work hard on her attempts at survival and endurance— more than anyone, the memoir is a homage to the tireless, endless,

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and self-aware labour of her mother. The mother’s native intelligence precluded Pawar from falling into the trap Tai fell into. From childhood to adulthood, Pawar is encouraged by her mother to take part in many kinds of domestic and educational work, and Pawar is eager to learn from all situations: from formal higher education, from informal education in activist and literary groups, from her own past, from the different kinds of dispossession that the urban poor live in, and from the difficulties of fund-raising for diverse subaltern causes. The public space (where even as one tries to speak, the stench of the nearby water-less toilet nauseates) provides a sharp sensory education that no amount of mere reading in a library could accomplish. There is the further inescapable fact that Pawar has to keep her husband’s curfews. The burden of so many tyrannies are compressed in her journey of self-fashioning. These challenges prepare her to confront the many modes of denial and escapism—for example, under the rubric of ‘individuality’, upper-class Dalits spoke of how they need to individuate themselves from the community-as-a-whole. Pawar counters that it was the work of those whose personal-self extended into the community that provided the base from which upper-class Dalits could make a claim to individuality in the first place (271). Later, to the equally entrenched view that what the poor needed was only skill-training (sewing machines, children’s text-books) or charity (free saris and mosquito nets), she makes the argument for a greater public voice and participation: ‘we wanted to awaken the sense of identity and selfhood in everyone’ (277). It was harder to persuade people to give time, or to raise funds for the projects Pawar felt were integral to the cause, even if not immediately useful, such as compiling interviews of the older generation of activists and intellectuals. Many of the older activists had worked in a less sympathetic environment and had been physically abused by their family for not observing the rules of the household and ‘going out’ in public. Some of them had to break away from the family entirely and sometimes, just to

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avoid loose talk, take to converting to Buddhist nun-ship (295). This rich legacy of sacrifice and service was being quickly forgotten by the younger generation of Dalit activists. Material prosperity had brought ingratitude and self-deception. As Pawar tours the villages in south Konkan, she notices signs of wealth: Mangalore tiles and stone walls. But many of the old gods, rituals, and practices (such as hanging bundles of bones from the roof or eating dead animals) had returned (291). The intellectual rationalist legacy of Dalit Buddhism had already become something of the past—the way to spend wealth was to go back to patronizing the old superstitions. Pawar’s attitude to her past is different—though she was of the same age as these wealthy villagers, her evolution had taken her in the opposite direction. Many who had stayed in the village had grown in wealth, but the intellectual legacy of Ambedkar was entirely forgotten. In contrast, Pawar earns a modest income, but it is her conscientious questioning of authority, via the explicitness of her scholarly and writing projects, that is her strongest affiliation to Ambedkar and Dalit Buddhism. It had taken her much labour to obtain her unique and individual voice. The mythicized, tireless labour of the village women with which the memoir begins stands as metonym for the labour required to achieve a harmonious fit in the world. When Pawar looks back at the women’s hard work, her tone is not one of complaint at their harsh life but rather a respectful and loving admiration of that world they inhabited—the sensuality of their healthful bodies, fragrant with the smells of mango, cashew, and cow-dung, even as they traversed sunlit landscapes light-footed; the touch and taste of cool, pure mountain streams on feet jagged from walking, their sun-burnished faces full of smiles and strong teeth. From that first paragraph of the memoir, one can see Pawar’s style as distinct, almost classically lyrical, and thus very different from the tone of voice of many of her contemporaries, such as Bama and Baby Kamble (Bama 2014; Kamble 2008). The tone is leisured—a

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recollection from a hard-won tranquillity, from having drunk water after a long walk in the sun. Pawar’s writing is lyrical, thickly descriptive of events, faces, behaviours, clothes, and colours—it is very visual, quietly mature, humorous, and graceful. It has an emotive and affective expansiveness. In her writing, there is the murmur of the mountain rivers, just as she had written that the very bodies of the labouring women carried in their interior the sound of splashing streams (15). The planes of development are more complex and tiered than a simple movement from misery to joy, or ignorance to enlightenment. In Pawar, the past with all its horror can somehow be present without being entirely subsumed and condemned. The present is enriched with this co-presence of memory. Such narrativization of the self can be variably steeped in diverse affective modes—for instance, as suggested above, lyric exaltation. This will be studied further through Agyeya’s novel Shekhar in the following chapter, as also the counterpoint of the mode, the insouciantly, even outlandishly, humorous in Ismat Chughtai’s The Crooked Line.

Third Study Modes of the Bildung: Humour and the Lyric

Before entering the circular death trap / Who was I? What was I? / I will not remember / Once I enter. / After entering the circular death trap / I will not even realize / How excruciatingly close were we: / Myself and the enemy. / … The light in which decisions are made, / Does it render all things equal? —Chitre (2009) I have come to realize that excellence is achieved through devotion. … There is a Greek legend. It is a superb legend. I always remember the moral of this legend. It is devoted to a Greek goddess named Demeter, who happens to roam into Keleus’ court looking for her daughter. As she was disguised as a nurse, no one recognized her. Every night, when everyone was fast asleep, Demeter lifted the child from his comfortable cradle and placed it nude into burning flames to make it divine. As the child endured the fire, it gained strength. As the child was still acquiring some robustness and divinity, a worried Metaneira [the empress foster mother] broke into the palace where the child was being subjected to an experiment in divinity. Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature. Nikhil Govind, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199498727.003.0003

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The alarmed and frightened empress pushed aside the goddess who was engaged in divinizing the child. Consequently, the child failed to attain divinity. To me the legend has but one implication, that one must have strength to endure suffering. —Ambedkar (2017, 143)

One of Urmila Pawar’s important predecessors in writing the self was Ismat Chughtai, whose novelized autobiography, The Crooked Line, was published in 1944. Chughtai’s work doesn’t itself thematize distinctions between life-writing, autobiography, fictionalized or novelized selves, memoir, fragments, and so on. This book too would wish to keep these genres blurred and flowing into each other, for the literary commentary here seeks to probe the notions of self, whose ultimate explanation cannot reside in the refinements of genre categories but rather, in a deeper anatomization of the literary aesthetics of selfhood. The Crooked Line is an astonishing and sui generis novel in the ways in which it confronts notions of self-fashioning, and anyone encountering it for the first time would be joyfully amazed at the novel’s playful, candid ease with the bizarre (the bizarre as a sustained and primary affect is still rare in Indian fiction). A straightforward, detailed description of growing up in a northern Indian Muslim middle-class family in a medium-sized town in the 1920s would have been novel enough. But the novel takes many further steps. What immediately strikes one is the rush of affect that begins from the descriptions of the protagonist Shaman’s earliest childhood. Plunged into media res, the reader discovers Shaman to be a wild, almost feral child. She was of an ‘ill-timed’ birth, born in the ‘animal shed’ of a teeming house, had the ‘face of a mouse’, a ‘hungry bitch’, constantly needing attention, interrupting her wet-nurse’s trysts with her lover, and feeling ‘orphaned’, ‘her heart welled up and she would begin to cry in a mournful voice’, ‘a wounded expression … [breaking into] tears’, ‘reappeared in the evening looking like a mad bitch … the once

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billowing frock resembled a dead rat’s skin … her nostrils so densely packed with snot and muck they reminded one of doors walled in cement … she emitted an odour that one could only associate with a plague-ridden rat’—all this description occurs in the first few pages, and such vividness barely lets up through childhood and adolescence. There is of course an implicit older narrative voice describing the needy baby, but even that older voice richly embodies, through the narrative prose, the baby’s greed for life, love, and attention. The third-person narrative tone here is explicitly a management of affect through time and growth. The novel was written by Chughtai in her early 30s, and Shaman is approximately that age by the end of the novel. Much of the joy of the novel is in the vantage of humour, one that frequently borders on the outlandish. This adds to what would otherwise have been a detailed but flat description of a social class in an anonymous Indian town. To some, it might be that the commitment to the outlandish freezes the voice in a single perspective. As a consequence, the voice seems unable to shift affect and does not allow the reader to orient herself to what must be an equally valid rendering of the situation—that the protagonist is a deeply neglected child (the youngest of 10 children, an unwanted girl child, one who scarcely gets to meet either parent, and who is passed around in a succession of domestic help, wet nurses, elder sisters—all of whom leave, making her feel repeatedly abandoned). This structure of feeling abandoned is the psychic core of her childhood, though it is written entirely in the idiom of the impish and fantastical, rather than that of self-pity or maturity. The joy of the novel is in this embrace of the peculiar, and yet one wishes, especially in the latter half of the novel, for a caesura in the tone. Much of this chapter will discuss another novel, Agyeya’s Shekhar: A Life, the second volume of which was published in the same year as The Crooked Line. Both writers were born in 1911, and these novels have been considered loose fictional adaptations of their lives.

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The novels comprise the same sequence of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood, and despite their organization as a type of bildung, and even though many of the circumstances of their life, history, family, and social station in middle-class northern India were similar, the overall affect of the novels is strikingly different. Although both novels are for the most part arranged linearly, Shekhar is more formally inventive in its temporal sequencing as well as in its lyric mode of apprehending the world. Dominant and powerful affects such as humiliation or grief pervade the narrative of Shekhar, suffusing it with despair and un-freedom. In a key moment in his early childhood, Shekhar, the eponymous protagonist, overhears his mother telling his father that she does not trust Shekhar. It would seem that all of Shekhar is a long, wounded, explicit meditation on family relationships—a tone of injury that we have seen The Crooked Line deliberately abjures. In Shekhar, the estrangement is so great that the protagonist ultimately goes beyond not only the pale of the family but also the state at large—he becomes a criminal/political revolutionary against the colonial government. The reason for bringing these two contemporary novels together in this chapter is to remind one of the lineage of the developmental novel that contemporary Indian novelists such as Urmila Pawar inherit. By the 1940s itself, Shekhar and The Crooked Line were two paradigmatic and widely influential novels that explored the variety of modes through which extreme negative affects (such as neglect, betrayal, and discrimination) were negotiated as a necessary prelude to the growth of the self. In the case of some writers, such as Pawar, these potent affects are internalized and processed and, in turn, become the spur through which a life of dignity and assurance is lived. There is a hard-won wisdom by the end of Aaydan, a wistful gaze at the long, curving, murky pathways of the past. Aaydan possesses the gift of time and crafted retrospection, for it is written by an older author who has learned to process grief and communicate

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creativity and solidarity through her writing. Such a work is one of grace, ennoblement, and high moral tone. In contrast, novels by younger novelists (Chughtai and Agyeya were both in their 30s at the time they wrote the novels referred to) could not quite aspire to such a lofty or forgiving tone. They were too close to the events described in the work, were still young, and it might thus have been more contrived to end on a detached moral note. They were also active political figures, often on the wrong side of the law, and still engaging in real time with the judicial and police systems. Agyeya had been jailed for political extremism, and Chughtai had got into trouble with censors with regard to alleged homosexuality in her short story The Quilt (Gopal 2005). Yet, it is also the case that they were trying to break precisely from the didactic tone of writers of an earlier generation, such as Premchand (equally influential in Hindi and Urdu). Agyeya and Chughtai argued for a more openended, vulnerable subject, one more attuned to the fluidity of desire and despair, and whose subjectivity could not be entirely reconciled under the aegis of any social utopia. So, it is worth paying attention to the mechanics of strong affect in the more compressed time frame of youthful protagonists. If there is no long retrospection, no tone of detached writing (as in Pawar), is there then a particular dynamic to the tumult of affect as it forces itself into the narrative self-becoming? Affects are severely heightened in these young protagonists— their life seems comprised of many extreme moments. In this situation, where there is no long working out of the affects and meaning, a more immediate interpretation of events may be more aligned to the subjectivity of the protagonists. The plot of Shekhar, published in two volumes in 1941 and 1944, consists of the fragmented, disturbed images of the life of a youth in his mid-20s, who is about to be hanged by the colonial state. In prison, grief has an immediate relation to both spatialization and performativity. There is the prisoner’s small individual cell in which he paces up and down in silence,

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even as his mind teems with memories, frustrations, and thwarted aspirations. All these emotions and images are never explained with a clear or coherent causality of plot—even by the end of the second volume. Agyeya had promised a third volume, and had apparently written it, but he chose not to publish (Mishra 2008). The prose of the novel (which is credited with inaugurating Hindi modernism) replicates the fervour of such an entrapped, seething mind. It is a heated moment, reminiscent of Merleau Ponty’s comment in the Visible and the Invisible that ‘What I am all told overflows what I am for myself ’ (1964, 60). There is the grim and testing company of disjointed memories and images that leap out of the walls of the bare prison cell. All these memories are ineluctably associated with his barely manageable emotions—guilt, anger, a sense of betrayal, confusion, and of feeling unprotected and star-crossed. Shekhar is less an account of the horror of prison and more the horror of a wholly alienated life, the full arc of which the protagonist is only able to grasp in the naked hallucinatory space of the prison. Prison is less a place to explore the nationalist politics that led him there and more a time to explore themes such as family-betrayal, romance, education, and the friendships of a short but intensely lived life. From the first pages, the rich language of Shekhar draws attention to itself—self-reflection is directly embodied in vibratory Sanskrit-leaning Hindi prose. There is a sense of life and language as not mundane but opening onto a dark and persistent grandeur that underwrites plebeian bourgeois life. Here is an image from the early pages of the novel: a memory of Srinagar, the protagonist is eight, drifting on a houseboat. His 13-year-old sister recites the text of the classical Sanskrit poet Kalidas’s poem Raghuvamsha (The House of the King Raghu). The boy is picking flowers, making necklaces of their stalks, and putting it around the neck of his sister as she dreamily recites the lines. The quiet lake is asleep and the grass around it are like eyelashes; voices are swimmers riding the

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waves of the lake as the moon walks naked, shedding its coat of night-darkness (Agyeya 2018 [1941], 10). Contrast this visual idyll of the family with Shaman in The Crooked Line: the dirt she was fascinated by, her perennially soiled clothes: ‘she wished she could take all the world’s mud and collect it under her tongue, mix it with her spittle, and then let the viscous curds glide down her throat’, and her aggression: ‘girls generally nurse a desire to get married, but of late Shaman had been experiencing a desire to hit people’ (Chughtai 2006, 8–9). There are further images of shredded dolls, lice-ridden hair, a chaotic protest at a favourite sister’s wedding (she clearly felt abandoned by that older sister due to the marriage). The trope of the elder sister–figure as being the only one who can truly understand the sensitive protagonist is present in many of the novels of the 1930s and the 1940s—it is also present in Agyeya’s Shekhar, but is present most famously in Jainendra’s Resignation (1937). These elder sisters always get married and go on to live unhappy married lives, and also leave a desolate sibling behind in the natal home. When her sister leaves, Shaman feels ‘as if someone in the family had died’ (Chughtai 2006, 17). Grief as well as the attendant inchoate aggression has no buffer and only increases with age. Agyeya, plotting a similar tale of childhood alienation and loss of loved ones, uses a tone of lyric despair, with the unhappiness of the future self projecting backwards into the narrative. Chughtai’s idiom is more hyperbolic, manic humour. Either way, childhood is the self at its most vulnerable and vivid—there is no introspective thrust of a later remembering self. Adulthood not only cannot transcend trauma, but there is also the fact that childhood is always around the corner to ambush adulthood, to blur or even annul the passage of time and learning. What is significant is not childhood or adulthood as biological phases as much as they are synecdochical for the self in its most pulsating moments of concealment and exposure. The novel-form for Agyeya and Chughtai is this

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series of triggers of heightened perception, and the self thus made vulnerable can neither be truly adult nor child but rather, an open moral injury with blood flowing freely outward. Like Chughtai, the tone in Agyeya is signalled early—the poetic register, the developed bouquets of images, and the multiple temporalities (the urgent present and the more languid past of childhood and youth). While speaking of the past, the narrator in Shekhar does not neglect the present, for the present retracts the past: Therefore the story in which the message inheres will belong to ‘him’. His name is Shekhar. He is currently awaiting death. In this waiting he is revealing his selfhood to himself, and after reading the truth of his life, drawing out its essence and transcribing it, I will also be leaving. I am leaving. Where? The same place he is going— where we are both strangers … and our unity is awaiting its death. (Agyeya 2018, 33)

The lyric, reflective mode contributes to the wealth of the narrative tone, its dreamlike quality, its speed and pace, and its visuality. The reader feels suspended within the text. Only slowly do the obscurations unravel—one cannot hurry the narrator, even though one would think that due to the imminence of the hanging, the narrative voice would be urgent and sharp. But the narrator curates the movements of his memory and perceptions at his own pace: a prison-cell in the present triggers a memory of a houseboat in the distant past. The rapid shifts of space, time, and event does not allow the reader to apprehend the plot in its full three-dimensionality. The intrinsic drama of the threat of hanging and the quality of the dream-descriptions keep the reader engaged. The sentences seem serpentine, enwrapping spare kernels of fact. The register of the writing is imagistic, immediate, and theatrical (the falling curtains) as well as speculative (thoughts on death and fulfilment). Time is looped: ‘I am performing my life’s retrospective, I am living the life I have already

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lived a second time. I, who had always looked ahead, have come to the final stretch of my life’s journey and am now looking back to see where I came from and how I drifted’ (2). Space is made explosive by repression and miniaturization—the cell is five paces long and three paces wide, dark and barred—and the expansion of the subject is accelerated by the sense of claustrophobia (20). The narrative voice has strong dissociative properties; where one would expect urgency, one often finds a leisured remembering and embroidering of the past self. Writing attempts not only to recapture but to reclaim, and master—a future memory is at stake. The condemned wants to be remembered as someone who is fundamentally authentic, beyond the juridical judgment of guilt or innocence. Under the pressure of the legal, the elaboration of subjectivity takes on new contours and substance. Likewise, The Crooked Lines also claims a similar amplified, deeply splintered modernist selfconsciousness. In an extraordinary chapter, after a lover turns out to be married, Shaman sinks into a depressive spell. The representation of the psyche as it interweaves the world is extraordinary. Here is the broad sequence of images: she stays in a state between sleep and waking, and in that inter-world ‘lanterns came to life on the streets, tongas sprinted behind one another … lorries jammed with people swayed like elephants … for one brief moment she wanted to pick up the crystalline pieces of broken glass and chew them like icy peas … grinding her teeth, she kicked the fragments forcefully with her foot … glimmering particles burst and flew about like half-dead sparks. … It made her feel as if the clouds tangled in her temples had suddenly loosened … she was so diminutive, the books as big as watermelon seeds, the stool and clothes pegs as big as buttons’ (Chughtai 2006, 274–6). The sequence of unreal images captures all the contradictory strains of excitement, fear, helplessness, and power. Shekhar too uses such unexpected conjunctions of images and affects more frequently, especially in the moments of crisis in the novel—and for him, such

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powers of dissociation are intrinsic to the psychographic thrust of the novel. Negotiation of Childhood Shadows One can see how childhood lays the groundwork for an adolescence and youth that would unsurprisingly be full of anguish and confusion. The many strained life elements of the bildung—childhood, family, school, adolescence/puberty, college, livelihood, and young adulthood—are managed differently in Chughtai and Agyeya, with the former resorting to the mode of the outlandish and the latter to an exalted sense of self-injury. This section will follow Shekhar’s journey first and then follow Shaman through similar life battles. Shekhar begins with an exquisite description of his childhood self—playing with his sister in the Himalayan-rimmed Kashmir. But that moment of childhood also had another memory, one which appeared to him unbidden as he sat morose in his prison cell. This one is painful: he overhears his mother referring to him as undependable and untrustworthy. This plays repeatedly in his memory and becomes an important aspect of his beleaguered self-image. Shekhar remembers this earlier rejection when he is unable to get publishers interested in his manuscript. His feelings of isolation get exacerbated when he finds he cannot react appropriately (when an adult) to the news of his mother’s unexpected death. He feels that he cannot ever quite forgive her for that childhood slight that had burned its way into his psyche. It takes him a long time to be able to express what he feels, even to himself. Much later, he does cry copiously, acknowledging his depth of feeling on this matter. His partner Shashi comforts him in this hour of need. And there are silver linings: not unexpectedly, the death of his mother allows him to have a closer and more intimate relationship with his father who, for the first time, talks of his own youth, ideals, failures, and compromises. The father shares, for the first time, that

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some of his friends had also lived intense political lives, and that some had even been hanged by the British as political prisoners. Seeing his son risk the same fate brings them closer together. The father begins to dwell on his memories and remarks that political hatred brings only a kind of madness in its train. Shekhar is reminded of a diary entry: he had written that he ‘hated’ his mother (the word ‘hate’ was written in English). The note in the diary was also the first thought that had come to his mind when he was arrested by the British—he felt that with the shame of his arrest, his mother’s contempt for him would be vindicated. Strangely, this certainty of her response calms him. He remembers many other images from his childhood: how he had run away, his vague sense of perpetual disgust, and his dream of destroying his home (Shekhar 2017, 29). When he runs away, he reaches a waterfall that he had often seen. He spends the night there. The next morning, that ribbon of road whence he had travelled seems to him the very corridor of freedom. When the narrator looks back on his childhood hate, he imagines that such hate was good because it dissolves all personality, and that this dissolution was required for creativity to emerge (18). Shaman’s idiom of alienation from the family was different. The tone is more akin to that of an amoral, vastly needy child, lost in a large family, unnoticed, neglected. When she first goes to school, she simply assumes that it would be a place as hostile as home: ‘When Shaman arrived at school, she first looked carefully all around her to make sure she knew exactly where the enemy might strike her from’ (Chughtai 2006, 46). She is laughed at for her manners and for her difficulty in adjusting to all the varied social and academic standards. Forced to survive, her language and behaviour turns coarser, more belligerent, and at home she begins to insouciantly steal money. Back in school, she is infatuated with a new, young teacher who becomes the first person to actively take interest in her—the teacher finds Shaman distinct, and uniquely hilarious. Unlike Shekhar, Shaman’s

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homo-social residential school life, mediated by friends and teachers, helps her grow, even if that growth is turbulent and confusing. Shekhar remains deeply isolated in both institutions and at home. Though alert, he has difficulty listening to teachers, and is easily hurt when his father chastises him at home. He learns better from his sister and develops (in a boyhood described in lush and anguished detail) a contempt for formal, punitive education. He is estranged within the family, even though he knows that at least his father was tacitly admiring of his intellect. But even the father often acts strangely—one of the first bewilderments for Shekhar (from which he learns something of social mystery) is that he is not allowed to share food with a particular girl as she belongs to a lower caste. Speech and play was allowed but not the sharing of food. The narrator begins to realize, in contradiction to a child’s natural selfconfidence, that one cannot create the social world in the image of one’s ideas. A later incident re-enforces this: the narrator wants to drink water from the house of a lower-caste person, but the person is not willing to give the water. The intransigence of the situation is made clearer when the narrator’s friend insults the person, saying that the person was rather proud for someone who carries faeces all day. Shaman is somewhat protected from the issues of caste and class in school, even though she is acutely aware of her more privileged schoolmates. Chughtai is herself rather obsessed with colour throughout her oeuvre, and there are plenty of references to dark Dravidians. But it is sexual exploration rather than social issues that continually renders incoherent her sense of self. Much of her growth is through homo-erotic encounters and situations in an all-girls school and college. It is in college that there is an awareness of relatively more universal political positions. Yet, even in college, for her, the sociopolitical is strongly mediated by the individuals holding political opinions. This is particularly clear during electioneering—the battle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ camps are inseparable from

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the romantic and sexual dynamics between the concerned young men and women. For Shekhar, it is not formal education in school or college but rather, social episodes that take place in his house and neighbourhood that mould him. He is much less of an institution-person than Shaman—this may be the privilege of gender and male mobility, but it also isolates him from everyone, including most of his family. Not surprisingly, he finds common cause with more fringe political groups, including those not averse to violence. His socialization happens in these secret, underground interstices—and being part of these groups isolates him further from the mainstream (in contrast, even if Shaman holds non-mainstream opinions, they are not so far off from the political centre as to be actively criminalized). Shekhar’s path is more solitary, and even the friendships of these groups only serve to further his alienation—being a member of what is almost a cult not only effectively isolates him from the broader social realm but also renders his relations within this small group as purely pragmatic, of everyday survival rather than deep solidarity. As a child, he had once opened a forbidden cupboard in his mother’s room and read books on romance and eroticism that children his age were not supposed to read. For him, it was only illicit knowledge that initially felt nourishing and freeing. Reading made him want to write, and his early writing takes place against a background of guilt and exhausting family squabble. The angry voices of his argumentative parents drove him further and further into the interior world of his writing—only his elder sister Saraswati was allowed entry into this tangled mind of his. Deception and secrecy seem integral to his growth—growth had become a complicated process of memory-forging, of pruning away an everyday petty and discordant world: Calling these memories ‘memories’ requires stretching the meaning of the word. After all, I don’t remember things exactly like this, or more

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precisely I don’t remember the facts. When I look to the past these things don’t appear like images before my eyes. I only remember the feelings that I experienced, that special state of mind I was in when I took part in a certain scene. These images that I sketch are the phantasmal impressions left on the screen erected by that state of mind. If these are memories then they are the free-associative memories of the mind, not the kind of memories for which we use our eyes to fix the original impressions ... But what is education? Not a series of images. It’s a series of feelings—feelings whose gradual development we can observe; that grow wider and deeper, on top of which these images are suspended. These images are in one sense the funerary remains of those feelings, and life is a wide expanse of such memorials. (62–3)

The emphasis on feelings—as opposed to fact, image, completeness, and education—is what suffuses the lyric voice in Shekhar. There is an intimacy with death (‘wide expanse of funerals’) as it abuts one’s life as a faithful, following shadow. The nous of death is evident from the first word of the book (‘hanging’). This sense of death inflects all his relationships (he experiences the death of friends even in his childhood), and death comes to mean many things to him—including being a test of faith. Death is the dissolution and finitude that grants retrospective meaning to life and self. Even his meetings with his partner Shashi are often on the occasion of funerals, or during the long dying of relatives. As a child, he had seen someone serenely accept being bitten by a snake and dying with god’s name on his lips—he felt this episode giving him courage and faith. As a boy, Shekhar roams in the expanse of nature—his boyhood was spent in a hushed landscape filled with ruins of medieval gardens and palaces, towers and river-vistas. These nourished his boyhood self and gave him a sense of the expansiveness of the world. But in those same landscapes, he felt the pre-figurations of a dissolution—the vast expansiveness of nature made him seem small, and on the verge of inconsequence and disappearance. In the later works of Agyeya,

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such as his travelogues, this experience of dissolution in beauty was something he consciously sought, especially in his travels in the Himalayas. For him, the Himalayas stood for beauty and silence, and he returns to it many times in his life and writings. In Shekhar, after a degrading visit to a brothel, the protagonist rushes off to the Himalayas, where, in the midst of that calm, monumental, and open beauty, he achieves a break-through in his writing. Beauty suddenly seems tangible and haptic, a ‘deeply felt wound’ (292). For him, this sense of the great outdoors includes the many temples that dot the hills. And though Shekhar often questions religion, he is moved by the faces of piety in the many tiny riverside and island temples that dot the landscape of the lower Himalayas (100). In the Kashmir of his childhood, a sense of a bountiful nature had given Shekhar a rare sense of peace and belonging in the world. He writes that he roams in nature as a child with friends (98). Walking in nature is the retaining of solitude within proximity—two children (he and a friend) walk the mountains, quiet, happy, at peace and at ease with the world. As the narrator puts it finely, children are the most sensitive to remoteness in others, but perhaps the self-sufficiency of his friend prevents her from noticing or being hurt by the essential solitariness of Shekhar (98). There is little of the outdoors in Shaman—the world is always that of institutions, be it the house or school or college. When she undertakes a journey, it is in a train, and the solitariness there is in the midst of the urban. It is no lesser solitude than Shekhar’s: Shaman too travels in a third-class compartment, partly out of restlessness and frustration, and partly out of a desire to reconnect with a lost friend. What stirs her, even if it only stirs a Naipaulian disgust, are ‘jolts in the train, these crowds, this rotting food, these smells. Whatever it is, grab it with both hands in this life. In changing trains, one encountered the pleasure of going from one world to the next because for third class passengers it is difficult to obtain even a

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place worse than an animal shed’ (Chughtai 2006, 231–2). There are beggars, orphans, dogs, children, and ‘bananas that peeped from her basket like alluring courtesans’ (232). When she finally does find the long-lost friend, she proceeds to argue about life and love and taboo—Shaman is intensely social, even if, at a sufficient remove, one can espy a deeper solitariness. Shekhar repeatedly thematizes the internal life where an inexhaustible well of negative emotions (such as anger, emptiness, and hostility) keep the external world at a distance. This crowded and trapped inner life is represented as solitary: there is an image of Shekhar running in the fields with his dog, happily free from the world of social policing. The novel is an extended portrait of an interiority, a ‘subjectivity’ hard to match in modern Indian literature. An inner sense of remoteness matches the outer asociality. The validation of this existential situation is sometimes seen as typical of modern alienation—as Levinas writes, ‘The discontinuity of the inner life interrupts historical time’ (1969, 57). Chughtai does not endlessly thematize this disjunct of inner and outer, though even in her work there is the undercurrent of dissatisfaction, a gap between inarticulate amoral desire and external fulfilment. This gap between desire and consummation grows over time in both novels. Moments of heightened solitariness do not preclude, in either Chughtai or Agyeya, the repeated attempts at re-immersion in the worldly or the social. Chughtai returns to the social in terms of equals—friends or lovers, and there is a more egalitarian give-andtake of conversation. In Agyeya, the re-immersions tend to be meant as fleeting, as only mitigating the absolute loneliness—childhood friends who would leave, or whom one would leave (the adult world of parents who keep moving from one town to another as part of their jobs); or the momentary rapture with animal companions, the exhilaration Shekhar feels as he races his dog Taimur through a dense field of pulses, tearing his shirt and bleeding as they run through the

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stalks. His friendships cut a wider swathe but are more temporary. As an independent-minded boy, he has access to people who the adults of his social class may eschew: a weaver helps him make fireworks, he learns to hunt and skin iguanas, and to float on banana trunks in the river. Physical exertions helped him work off his anxieties, and they bring a happy exhaustion and as he floats down the river in an improvised boat. These are precious, fugitive images of freedom. Much of his mobility and access across class, caste, and physical locations was perhaps foreclosed to a young woman such as Shaman. Shaman’s friendships were thus located across the more conventional axes of school, college, and later, her profession. A new site of loneliness emerges when the young Shekhar finds himself in a big city, Madras (as the city of Chennai was then called) and in largely unfamiliar South India. He is 15. Loneliness is made tangible as a question of everyday survival—no one is there to provide him food or tell him how to save—he has just left his family for the first time in his life. He has come to Madras to study, and the city is to him an ensemble of dormitories, humidity, and unfriendly college-mates and seniors. There is also the inevitable, difficult, and guilty discovery of sexuality, a sense of confusion about what he really wants, and the recurring desire for flight—all of which generate, paradoxically, a new nostalgia for the home he had never loved. In Madras hostels, Shekhar learns that even the glance of the lower castes was considered polluting for the upper castes when they ate. Shekhar does not follow these norms and comes to be seen as a pollutant himself. His upper-caste college-mates petition to have him removed from the hostel. As always, these external humiliations set off chains of internal restlessness in him. The literary theorist Franco Moretti has written of the significance of the bildung in maintaining the centrality of youth (Moretti 1987). According to Moretti, it is through the bildung that for the first time youth is seen as the quintessential age, the essence of life; but youth is now also seen as

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possessing a consciousness of its own instability, and even a sense of maturity in having to accept limits and ageing (Moretti 1987). Even for Shekhar, youth is this metabolizing of the social in all its many affects—of exclusion, of outrage, and of wonder at the strangeness of the world. When Shekhar travels to the Malabar region (to what is now the northern part of the state of Kerala), he learns that the lower castes cross rivers in boats as the bridge is considered an upper-caste monopoly. On many streets, a lower-caste person has to announce himself as an untouchable and move away—even their shadow is considered polluting (Menon 2005). Shekhar does not travel as a social worker, and he communicates his horror at these practices only through a rather detached guilt. The priority is simply to travel, to learn more of the world: as if he has a premonition that only by traveling will he know why he must travel. Once, on a deserted road in the evening, he finds a severely wounded, female body. It is hard for him to touch—both caste and gender consequences flash through his mind. But he finally decides to carry her back to the Arya Samaj (Society of Nobles) building where he is staying. The woman, however, dies and is buried—she is an untouchable. The next day, he reads in the newspaper that her murder was likely committed by upper castes for being, literally, on the wrong side of the road—there were strict rules in Kerala about which side of the road which caste can walk on. Partly due to this incident, he resolves to live in the untouchables’ quarters in Madras. These were the seeds of Shekhar’s political awakening, even if it is not immediately apparent to him. In time, he gets more involved in politics, and is even arrested. Despite his conviction in his beliefs, he is shaken at the prospect of a gigantic, remote juridical system pronouncing him guilty. The minutiae and bureaucracy of the system baffle him: was he in custody or in prison, would he have to defend himself or was the system obligated to provide him a defence, what was the meaning and scope of the term ‘political prisoner’, and what

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was the relevance of this typology of prisoners to how he was to be treated and defended? The prison is a new epistemological space, and one has to learn all the rules from scratch—and the rules are not going to be simply handed to you on a piece of paper. There are important formal regulations, but there are more important informal regulations. He is not allowed to get in touch with anyone, and soon Shekhar feels himself in a no-man’s land as he realizes that he does not even know which part of the town he is in. The bleak sameness of prisons—row after row of cells, iron gates beyond iron gates—cause him to feel as if he exists in some parallel void within the universe’s architecture. Prison, like any social trauma, short-circuits history and context: one may remember Anjum Habib’s similar bewilderments in the Delhi prisons. And like Habib, he begins to realize that prison (with its chronic isolations and uncertainties) may help one perceive that freedom can be as tangible as thirst. His life here reaches an extremity that Shaman’s does not. And yet, many of their insights and responses intertwine. From out of the hollow of trauma, Shekhar begins to write again to make sense of his life—for Shaman, it is not so much the act of writing, but that of economic independence and outspokenness that appears to be the key to transcend her imprisonment in polite society. Types of Moral Action: Writing/Teaching The meaningfulness of adulthood lies in its tension with childhood’s joys and difficulties: childhood must neither entrap the adult, nor, on the other hand, be entirely transcended. Meaningfulness includes negotiating relationships with all the primary caregivers, and especially an emergence from the shadows of mothers. Shaman’s mother was influential through her absence, and Shekhar’s mother’s anger was markedly present as cold, aloof, and inexpressive (Agyeya 2018, 136). The genres of the novel and the autobiography formally intertwine in

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Shekhar: the novel, subtitled ‘A Life’, unfolds in the first person with many hesitancies and silences, and though the protagonist is named Shekhar, all its readers in the 1940s knew that it drew heavily from Agyeya’s well-known political activism. Writing is both experience and the crafting of experience, action and the meaning of action. Beyond the distinction of the autobiography and the novel, there is a prior distinction in the narrative of a mysterious ‘I’ (the narrator, or the author) that dissociates from Shekhar: But when do I intend to write a novel? I only want to get rid of this weight on my shoulders; I don’t want to give my life over to anyone else, I want to realize it myself, because I want to offer it up such that after it’s been offered I won’t get it back. It will be completely destroyed—nothing will be left … then there won’t be Shekhar, there will only be me. This Shekhar, who dreams of being an artist, a fool choosing the fame of poets, will have ended, and what will be left over will be me, who will go to the gallows; it will be me, who I call ‘me’, and even when I say it I don’t know what ‘me’ means. (124)

Whatever the genre (novel or jeevani/life), writing is a way of unburdening, of spontaneously engaging with the world. But it is also a way of staking a claim, a claim of self-fulfilment, of autonomy, and of wrestling meaning. As a youth, Shekhar realizes that to write, one must read; and it is through the thicket of others’ voices that he finds his own. He reads widely and indiscriminately, all the way from the Sanskritic tradition to the most contemporary Hindi and European writing. Reading is a physical act with physical consequences—an ‘obsession’, a ‘current through his body, his hands began to tremble, and his head spun’ (158). This relationship to reading and writing is the only constant through a coming of age that is imperfect and testing. In the discipline of writing, he recognizes that the joy and force of the act of writing is superior to whatever is to be actually written about. What is important is

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that oceanic feeling of craft, of being linked to an immemorial and global genealogy of writers and thinkers. He asks, ‘Was there nothing that was beyond writing, that was so vast, so deep, that could not be contained because it was itself the container?’ (463). All this was particularly poignant as, on the other side of books, in the real world, he was dealing with the wreckage of a series of deaths. These included, by turn, his father, mother, sister Saraswati, and Sharda (a friend from his adolescence). And all these deaths come to fulfilment in the two framing deaths of the novel—the prospect of his own death by hanging (at the beginning of the novel), and the death-to-come of Shashi (at the end of the novel). Despite family tragedies, an adolescent Shekhar begins to process the experiences the world throws at him. His childhood disdain for educational institutions abates, and he enrols for a master’s in literature. Even though the classes are not particularly helpful, he uses the time to read prodigiously and meet and learn from a few sympathetic professors. But there is still a dissatisfaction in his life: he needs a stronger social outlet, a cause larger than himself. This leads to him volunteering for the Congress party. This was the late 1920s and the nationalist movement was at its height. He hopes that the formal discipline of an organized movement would help moor his floating self. Though he is conscientious, the lack of an equal conscientiousness among his peers enrages and frustrates him—the average ground-level Congressman is no different from a casual college-goer. Beyond the lofty talk of leaders and Round Tables, at the everyday level, political work was mundane, and consisted of tasks such as cleaning and guarding the arena where the large rallies took place. Shekhar is quickly disillusioned with this everyday political work, and his perennial anguish erupts again. At this point in the novel, there seems little prospect of Shekhar cultivating the patience required for deep faith in either citizenship or art. Levinas has remarked that ‘theology would be possible only as the contestation of the purely

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religious, and confirms it only by its failures or its struggles’ (Levinas 1991, 196). Shekhar has not yet learned that the strength of faith is to be measured by the strength of doubt. It is only at Shashi’s house that Shekhar finds relief—the easy talk and acclaim of revolution in college canteens now seems false to him and unable to provide him shelter, personal or intellectual. It is from Shashi that he learns that it is the sharing of grief that is the beginning of a mutual responsibility and togetherness. This simple insight serves as his moral compass—Shashi rarely speaks in the novel, but this one statement holds much of the key to her world view. With her help, he begins to formulate writing as a mediator between an authentic, inexpressible suffering and isolation on the one hand and the play of creativity on the other. He discovers that writing has become for him a compulsive need. Writing is the act that not only frees one from sorrow but also explores the lineaments of that sorrow and defuses it. The act of writing carves him out of his family, or rather, he sees his self as accommodating the family as an inner multitude. He says he must learn to write less in frenzy and with more calm and patience. To do this, he rents a small room and begins to write in a more organized fashion. Writing creates a new sense of home—the small room is soon filled with beloved, individually chosen books, and his writings are all carefully arranged. There are also sweets and other nourishments sent by well-wishers, and he is gratefully aware that Shashi had saved money to buy many of these books. He has an intense desire to share his world with Shashi—he feels that all he needed was her and a cabinet overflowing with books. When he thanks her, she insists that gifting is its own fulfilment and greater than the happiness of accumulation—as someone who has sacrificed a safe home, her statement carries much weight. Their life is one of both isolation from the world and a renewed intimacy with each other. As she remarks of their togetherness: ‘That

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part of my life, which is me, which is my “I” is inside of you’ (457). The nights and mornings are described as an atmosphere rich with the radiance of gift-giving and receiving, and the whole is accompanied by Shashi’s voice as she chants their favourite poetry and song. It is a fragile togetherness, of tenderness as well as shared grief and common work. These days are the happiest moments in the novel, and their memory transcends the tragedies that are soon to inevitably follow. In Shekhar, both joy and sorrow, politics and love, are written in a highly elevated tone. In great contrast, Shaman in The Crooked Line is much blunter and more cutting in her assessment of politics and its attendant idealisms. She has never succumbed to Shekhar’s naivety/idealism and always has a canny sense of egotism behind much posturing—political or romantic or filial. She remarks of one such failed politician: Do you know what happened to Dilip? He was arrested, and now he’s a chauffeur for the same viceroy whose car he had tried to blow up. When the viceroy’s car drives off, he’s there saluting the clouds of dust and the tyre marks that are left behind. But don’t think this defiance will be buried in the dust. No, this sentiment will continue to fester within him and when he dies, this unrealized aspiration will be transferred to his children as a permanent characteristic. Mehboob’s father managed to save him somehow, got him a government scholarship and sent him abroad. He has returned as a professor from there and is now teaching in some college. (Chughtai 2006, 209)

It is a stunning denouement of much (if not all) revolutionary sentiment: the atavism of rebellion mediated through the taken-forgranted privileges of class, the irresistible enticements of a government job, and the connections required to usurp that job. Even though Shekhar would disagree with little of this dismal diagnosis, he still has to believe that there was some revolution somewhere that rhymed with his own utopian sense of action.

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Shekhar is prevented from falling into the solipsism of (a humourless) hopelessness by Shashi—it is only love that can redeem, excite, and bring colour and feeling. On the one hand, that love is already foreclosed by a sense of impossibility—Shashi is married to a man unsympathetic to Shekhar. She had remained close to Shekhar when he began his political activities. Her suspicious husband assaulted her and threw her out of the house, and so she begins to live with Shekhar, who is himself fleeing from city to city, running from the police. It is an arduous life, full of uncertainty and doubt. What exactly were they doing and why? Did they really believe in the politics of this obscure faction that they ended up being enlisted in? Ineluctably, the police close in on them, and finally, it is Shashi who dies as she has been unable to go to the hospital for the treatment of the wound inflicted upon her by her husband as he had pushed her out of the house. The description of Shashi’s death remains among the most moving pages of literature of the first half of the 20th century. Yet, this high affect is achieved by constructing Shashi as an apotheosis of pure suffering: ‘as if quietly suffering, all her torments had further cleansed her’ (Agyeya 2018, 218). The idea of being cleansed by suffering is repeated several times on the page: ‘Shashi had taken the shape of some godhood that contained all of the wonder of life within’ (218). In contrast to this stereotype of the suffering, dying woman’s nobility, Shaman’s moral politics is decidedly more credible and worldly. Through her parodic description of the college elections (a synecdoche for democracy), Shaman is dismissive of the fusion of romantic love, suffering, and political action. She mocks the ubiquitous figure of the tubercular Urdu romantic poet who always stands for and then loses the election—the poet can turn revolutionary only in his sanatorium. Instead, The Crooked Line negotiates other urgencies. Not for Chughtai, the lush, self-absorbed sentimentality that both bedevils and elevates Agyeya’s Shekhar into what the literary historian Vasudha Dalmia considers a foundational modernist text (2012). Love and

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writing partly arrest Shekhar’s self-absorption, but Shaman’s narrative does not risk this fate for the simple reason that she had to continually earn her livelihood—educated Muslim women were not a familiar demographic to employers. Though her life is much less adventurous than Shekhar and Shashi’s life on the run, The Crooked Line is more insightful about the difficult business of middle-class survival. Even lesser-paying jobs such as teaching, which was all that most educated women could aspire for, were minefields of bureaucratic corruption, everyday humiliation, and sexual harassment. As teacher, with her characteristic humour, Shaman is witness to the travesty of what passes for education, and her description of how authorities hoodwink government inspectors rings true even today, 80 years later. Shekhar’s idealization of Shashi’s courage, on the other hand, is on a much higher register of sacrifice and death. Yet, even here, one can read Shekhar a little against the grain: Shashi, for one, does not speak of herself in the overwrought register for much of the novel, but rather through a quieter self-deprecation. She is less convinced about Shekhar’s politics and discerns far more authenticity in his desire to write. She recognizes that his writing is indeed contending with large and urgent questions: he had written of his foreboding sense of the contemporary moment, and of how this historical moment (the 1930s) was radically and lucidly new, and should no longer be understood through the lens of tradition or even the destruction of that tradition. Shekhar writes with vigour and passion about this sense of bearing direct and defiant witness to his times; there is the sense of risk-taking, a wager that life has to be intensely lived to have any worth. By witnessing Shekhar’s witnessing, Shashi performs all that is possible within an overall architecture dedicated to the projection of the heroic male revolutionary. The descriptions of the last scenes of Shashi’s life are deeply affecting. Even though young, she had already demonstrated—in her quiet but determined way—that she was firm in her choices and

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courageous with regard to consequences. In light of her imminent death, these are privileged moments of a Foucauldian parrhesia. While there is an aura of despair, it is not irredeemable tragedy, and her last days are full of a cherished togetherness in love, banter, and work (though she, somewhat predictably, insists that he stop cooking and only write, and then sell her jewellery for money). Though Shashi is so integral to the novel in these last sections, Shekhar’s selfreflexivity does not really have space for her voice. She is shown as a helper—when he shows concern for her health, she brushes it away. One wonders at Shekhar’s self-awareness regarding the fact that he is also responsible for the safety of a wounded woman who has given up so much to be with him. He gets more involved in the mysterious political organization, even as it becomes increasingly clear that it is not just pamphleteering but weapons-gathering that is involved. He moves up the organization to the position of a co-ordinator—no longer can he plead that he does not know what the organization’s intentions are. What Shashi thought of all this remains inexplicit: Shekhar claims he saw acceptance in her eyes, even though acceptance is hardly agreement. And this is even as the claustrophobia of their life grows ever stronger. This proximity of death is inseparable from their idea of work and everyday living. Shekhar finds that writing is not easy with the constant suspicion of their neighbours in the building. Shashi too begins to feel watched and trapped. They are forced to stay in the room on the fourth floor and not venture onto the terrace to fly kites with the children of the building, as Shekhar had promised. Their isolation as a couple is complete. His book on political extremists is to be published illegally and the publishers give him money to flee. Shekhar feels that Delhi is the best option for its size, anonymity, and opportunities for political work. In all these crucial decisions, the reader misses Shashi’s speech, advice, or opinion. Shekhar has flashes of self-awareness—‘But one could sense a deep sadness in that

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love, and an insufficient love in that sadness’ (512). But these do little to change the essential asymmetry of the situation. Shashi seems to have a deeper sense of foreboding of what is in store and tells him repeatedly to persist with the one thing he knows—to write. But he finds that he cannot in these circumstances, and an emptiness multiplies within him. Shashi desperately tries to remind him of the past, of the important people he met in prison, to give him a sense of insider-ship into his own life that he seems unable to access in these moments of high anxiety. In the end, it will be Shashi for whom that multiplied emptiness will be fatal. Shekhar feels paralyzed and, while the writing gets more lyrical in its descriptions of the Delhi winter, Shashi begins to foresee her death. Shekhar gets more involved in the mysterious organization and takes to hiding weapons and sheltering people he does not know. One day, he comes home late from some misadventure with these men. Shashi is feverish and tells him that she does not have long to live. She kisses him, making that gesture larger (and bolder and more agential) than her words. For the first time, even though she does not speak, her body communicates strong desire—lips that want to be kissed; then, ‘Shashi’s entire body, except her eyes, became lifeless matter’ (248). The literary scholar Marianne Hirsch has remarked thus on the extreme historical restriction of the female bildung (in the 18th and the 19th centuries): ‘Faced with the break between psychological needs and social imperatives, literary convention finds only one possible resolution: the heroine’s death’ (Hirsh 1983, 27). Shekhar attests to this appeal of the young, dead heroine. And The Crooked Line marks the achievement of a strong and original refusal of that tendentious norm. Shekhar does not grant Shashi the introspection and scepticism that Shaman claims and yet, enough is implied to show that Shashi’s presence affirms Shekhar—this is even as Shekhar’s subjectivity represses uncomfortable questions of asymmetry and exclusion. Had Agyeya/Shekhar (like many male revolutionaries in history and

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fiction) chosen art, politics, and personal freedom by consuming the life of the many women who had brought them to that level of selfconsciousness? The narration, offered in the wake of Shashi’s death, is a mixture of defensiveness and apology, mourning and appeasement. The Crooked Line leaves no such complex aftertaste of doubt—the narrative does not really require the memory of earlier events and is thus not cumulative or hostage to one great centrepiece romance. In The Crooked Line, lovers hurtle along, one after the other, each more absurd than the last: She did not hesitate to give the men all kinds of tasks. Suddenly late at night she would have a yearning of coconut oil, either because the present oil had developed an odour or because she didn’t like it anymore, and she’d make them run in the car despite the fact that petrol was so scarce these days. … She made them travel to Delhi or Calcutta on a search for the newest colours in georgette. In addition to all this, she made them change her pillow slips, wring out her cushions, and put a drawstring through a waistband with a tiny hairpin. She gave each the impression she socialized with the others just as a formality, and it was he who had broken her heart. When she was too intimate with one, she wanted the others to see her. … They followed her proudly with packages, shoeboxes, boxes of biscuits, and bundles of fresh vegetables. (Chughtai 2006, 281)

The romance at the end of the novel—with an Irish soldier named Ronnie Taylor—is perhaps the weakest part of the novel. The novel was more successful when it had Shaman engrossed in several simultaneous loves. These loves, unlike the foredoomed pathos of the Shekhar–Shashi romance, are far more worldly. While all of Shekhar’s affections culminate in his love for Shashi, Shaman’s life betrays no such pattern. For Shaman, after a series of same-sex attractions, there is the father of a friend, one who has ‘solid arches of the calves’, there is Satil’s ‘tight sports shirt sculpted to his shoulders’, Iftikhar’s

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‘well-built body’, and Comrade Samad who ‘kissed the marks on her ankles’ (280). Intense relationships/friendships with women such as Alma (who has an illegitimate child) continue throughout the novel, giving female homo-social relationships greater durability than many of the more casual heterosexual romances. And unlike the mistiness of time that Shekhar inhabits (one never quite knows how old he is, especially in the second volume), Shaman’s relationships exhibit a clear context of time and place—of college, work, or travel. The Crooked Line does have, for better and worse, a more forthright moral calculus than Shekhar—Shaman is often (though hilariously) mean to many of the people she meets, and there is no ultimate moral dilemma that keeps the narrative captive. Wit is the only sanctity within the inner logic of the text. The novel is a description of a woman as she makes her way through a prejudiced world—her heroism is muted (though as real as that of Shekhar or Shashi). There is no melodrama of death and meaning, and the novel ends on a note of minor exhaustion rather than Shekhar’s hyperbole of death and a tortured conscience. Shaman, like her location of time and space, college and jobs, also gives us a clear indication of historical events—there is continual reference to the second World War and the increasingly strident demand for Pakistan. This is in contrast to Shekhar’s world where the referent of the political becomes increasingly elusive—what is this fringe group that he has joined, what are its ideals, what is its position on any number of national or international issues? The reader cannot fathom Shekhar’s strange interior world where the police looms on every horizon. Shaman’s sceptical opinion on the war is no different from her equally sceptical opinion of male revolutionaries with their inseparable Florence Nightingales/ Shashis: ‘The sisters-in-law are probably the same; they don’t get along with anyone, not even their husbands, the babies don’t stop coming. Well there’s a need for children. It’s war time. The boys

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will become soldiers and return as the wounded, while the girls will bandage and nurse the wounded’ (246). Shekhar remains trapped in his head, even as the reader tries to clutch at the larger history (extremist nationalism) that Shekhar is putatively a part of. Thus, while the thrust of Shekhar’s interior density gestures toward a time that cannot be captured entirely by a historicist account, The Crooked Line is more at ease with a base historical timeline that it then easily bends to its own ends. Shaman and Shekhar are both protagonists (modelled on their authors) who grew up in northern India and came of age in the 1930s. They inherited the same historical moment (nationally and internationally), and were both on roughly the same progressive side of the anti-colonial spectrum. Yet their approaches were vastly different. Shaman’s notion of politics was strongly mediated by her partners, and she realized that women were not allowed to fully participate in the decision-making—this fictional fact mirrored historical fact (Gopal 2005, 29). Hence, her notion of freedom—political, romantic, and existential—was far more sceptical, detached, savagely parodic, and more aware of an ultimate mutability: ‘When the game is over, everything ends. The tanks will be melted down to produce railway tracks, the guns will become fast-moving automobiles, some of the metal will fall also into the soldiers’ laps in the shape of medals, which will eventually become rattles for children’ (294). The revolutionary or the soldier could easily use the rhetoric of progressivism or patriotism for deceiving trusting women, and it was the duty of the woman to protect herself from the more self-regarding grandiose postures that the progressives or the revolutionaries assumed. The ending of The Crooked Line has a compelling image that marries the internal and the external, the solitudes and the inner multiplicities: ‘She felt as though the whole world had shrunk into her own being. Her loneliness was inhabited by such a hustle and bustle today, how well-lit was [her] isolation’ (369).

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For Shekhar, his taboo love (Shashi is a married cousin) is internalized and made into a metaphysical question of personal isolation. Shekhar thus embodies a more naive/exalted view. A limitation of nationalist–progressive politics was that it did not fully take into account personal fulfilment. The politics of the outside world was largely instrumentalized into being a trigger for a deeper intersubjectivity and interiority—this self-absorption with felt violence gives Shekhar its lyric quality as well as its probing exploration of what commitment and action truly mean. Levinas has written of the corrosive experience of violence on romance, politics, and the psyche: ‘But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action’ (Levinas 1969, 21). An early Indian novel critically influential in elaborating this relation of moral action to subjectivation via foundational negative affects such as social shame (with its attendant desire for continual flight) is Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s Srikanta (published in four volumes in 1917, 1918, 1927, and 1933), and it is this novel that will be discussed in the following chapter.

Fourth Study Desire as Inner Mutuality

I am never positively conscious of my present individuality, being conscious of it only as what is or can be outgrown, only as I feel freeing myself from it and am free to the extent implied by such feeling. —Bhattacharya (1983, 454) Far from presupposing a subject, desire cannot be attained except at the point where someone is deprived of the power of saying ‘I’. —Deleuze and Parnet (1988, 89) I had little drive and less ambition. All the things men hankered after in the world—money, power, status, privileges—all seemed dreamlike and unreal to me. Sometimes, shamed by the energy and enthusiasm of others, I would try and rouse myself. —Chattopadhyay (2009 [1933], 472)

In Truth and Method, Gadamer enlarges the question of bildung (cultivation/education) in the context of the post-Kantian subjectivation of truth. There is a claim in this immediate post-Kantian Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature. Nikhil Govind, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199498727.003.0004

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generation (Fichte and Schiller) to an insistent consonance between aesthetics and morality. The free nomad—artist (and the cultivation/ education of, and into, the artwork) is now often pitted against both purely natural beauty as well as social norms; art’s victory over both social norms and natural beauty can only be temporary, personalistic, fleeting, and self-disintegrating (Gadamer 2004, 70–7). Yet, within, or because of this overall sense of disintegration and evanescence, there is the possibility of a heightened, more precious, and gossamer emotionality. In the Indian novelistic tradition, few novelists have so mastered this luxuriousness of feeling and affect that both draws from, and is devoured by, natural beauty and social norm than Saratchandra Chattopadhyay (1876–1938). Saratchandra Chattopadhyay’s writings, from at least as early as Devdas (1917), have been widely translated and much loved all over the Indian subcontinent (Kumar 2016). To most readers and critics, his most ambitious work and masterpiece is Srikanta—published in four parts: 1917, 1918, 1927, and 1933. The time of publication involved over 16 years, forming a large part of the writing life of Chattopadhyay and included his most mature phase. It may be argued that the essential construction and writing of novelistic Indian subjectivity owes much to this one master-novel, a work celebrated through translations, adaptations, and films in various languages. The novel itself is a roughly chronological account of the protagonist Srikanta, from his childhood onward. It follows the protagonist through his many adventures and travels, and through his many relationships and friendships. However, it does not end with any emphatic notion of bourgeois success, such as the classical bildung might have promised—the protagonist remains a minor clerk, his romantic life with different partners remains unsorted, and he retains an essential solitariness, unsatiety, and unresolved fascination with death and the disappearances of partners and friends. The quote in the epigraph above is his last overt introspection, and of a piece with

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the reflection at the beginning of the novel. The narrator frames the novel at the outset thus: As I sit down to tell my story in this fading afternoon of my wandering life, I am flooded with memories. … From childhood onwards I have carried the mark of shame branded on me by friends and strangers alike, so that I can no longer view my life as anything other than a prolonged stretch of ignominy. Yet, looking back, it seems to me that the cross I carry is undeserved … [chosen ones such as me are] compulsive rovers … [the] passion for experience overwhelms all norms of accepted conduct … [one is] driven to a state of exile within the very society that reared him. (Chattopadhyay 2009, 3)

This section will attempt to describe more systematically the above reflection with its interlinked dyad of themes: shame and a perpetual wandering, the latter perhaps being this very flight from the self. The theme of the wanderer pervades both terms; it is the unusual travels of boyhood that expose him to the disadvantaged and the ostracized of the society, and it is his compassion for and solidarity with these men and women that bring shame upon him—he is an upper-caste Brahmin boy who should not be consorting with loose women, Muslims, rowdy boys, and so on. A lifelong quarrel with such a judgmental social world forces him to take flight and compulsively travel, forming relationships with fellow seekers who have been similarly exiled due to their violation of social norms. Srikanta often refers to himself as primarily a traveller or wanderer. And indeed he does wander much in the novel—he moves from the village of his childhood in rural undivided Bengal to the metropole of Calcutta, then to other parts of India, such as Patna, and finally to Burma. Beyond the destination, travel includes the time spent in stimulating liminal spaces—ships and trains, the temporary rooms of friends and lovers, rented accommodations in alien cities, and a rural Vaishnavite ashram. The many spaces are superimposed on one

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another, pulling in different directions and moods: the languor of the ashram, the bustling office of the workplace, the wrought-iron bedstead of the lover, the walks in the Bengal hinterland hearing his friend recite classical poetry. Further, travel is inescapably a metaphor for the travels within, and through, one’s past—the discovery and rehabilitation of one’s injuries, curiosities, misrecognitions, dependencies, betrayals, all of which have left deep scars. Travel is a double movement through space and time, both a motivation and an arresting of feeling. To move forward is also to remember, to recover, to take bold leaps, and to sow the seeds for the key decisions one takes in life. While the above is impressive enough, it does not characterize the full power of Srikanta. There are further refinements to this universal theme of wandering and self-discovery. For one, it is important to keep in mind that this notion of travel is not a sovereign self that inscribes itself in a masculinist manner on the world. Rather, as will be discussed, there is a curious passivity and helplessness connoted in the travel. And consequently, the novel allows for a reading that dethrones the male upper-caste protagonist by seeing that the journeys of some of his companions (especially the trio of the courtesan Pyari Bai, the upper-caste woman Annada Didi living with a Muslim snake-charmer, and the Muslim poet Gahar) exceed Srikanta’s selfdiscoveries, and that part of the purpose of characterizing Srikanta as ‘lacking energy’ is to allow him to be more open to receiving the full moral weight of these other insights and narratives. This passivity is something positive, an openness, or—to cite Levinas againt—‘a uniqueness of the ego, my uniqueness as a respondent, a hostage, for whom no one else could be substituted … a sure harbour, or a place of retreat’ (Levinas 1991, 136). Too much is initially assumed in the conventionally romanticized figure of the male wanderer—his name adorns the bookcover and signals that it is his narrative that is the chief point of

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interest. But the truer travellers may well be these other characters who live more complex lives: (a) the courtesan is a Brahmin widow (that is, Pyari Bai/Rajlakshmi), and this chapter will retain both names to remind one of this doubleness, (b) Annada Didi is seen as promiscuous when she in truth retains high fidelity to traditional norms, and (c) Gahar is a rural landlord ostracized by his community for assimilating Hindu practices from the nearby Vaishnavite ashram, and he dies young with his work incomplete, partly due to the pain of his unrequited pining for a Hindu fellow-worshipper called Kamal Lata. Though this chapter does not have sufficient space to discuss them, there are other figures who exercise an equivalent power from the sidelines: Kamal Lata herself, as well as figures such as Abhaya and Sunanda, all of whom add complexity to the relatively monotone subjectivity of Srikanta. Like Pyari Bai/ Rajlakshmi, Annada Didi, and Gahar, these characters have also staked more in their inward and outward journeys than Srikanta. Srikanta is often merely the thread that connects them, receiving and gestating their stories. Srikanta’s occasional exhausted or cynical tone often etches the others sharper in their moral courage and agency. This chapter has three sections: the first two centred on Srikanta and the third on Rabindranath Tagore’s Malancha (Garden), written in 1934 and thus contemporaneous with Srikanta. The first section of the chapter will discuss the theme of shame that accrues from violating moral norms (something that all the characters share), while the second section will discuss travel as an explicit mode of negotiating that shame. The third section uses the vantage point of Tagore’s novel to critique the ideas of both shame and travel—for in Garden, the protagonist is a young dying woman, to whom shame is literalized as physical paralysis (she cannot leave her bed). Thus, travel is not possible for her at all, exposing the very privilege of health and free movement that Srikanta takes for granted.

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Travel is not a cure or motive for shame, and the first two sections (on Srikanta), though sequentially written, have to be read as reciprocal of and mutually determining each other. Though all characters negotiate shame and ostracism, all are in a harder position than Srikanta who has easier access to mobility and the male assumptions of safety in travel; the circumstances of women travellers are far more constrained and open to judgment. They do not have the luxury of easy conversation with strangers that make up a large part of Srikanta’s experience and education. Likewise, Gahar had lost his parents and young wife, had given away much of his land, and his commitment to write his version of the Ramayana (the sacred Hindu epic) has rooted him to the nearby ashram and its ethos. Here is Kamal Lata’s interpretation of Gahar’s behaviour: ‘His own people call him a kafir but he hasn’t abandoned the religion of his ancestors’ (Chattopadhyay 2009, 375). Gahar has risked more by staying, and his religious and landholder obligations do not have the extravagance of cosmopolitanism that Srikanta blithely claims. Again, it is Kamal Lata who trenchantly evaluates Srikanta, remarking that notwithstanding his relationships with the socially marginalized and eccentric, there is a sense of someone who takes much for granted: ‘[You] flit like a butterfly from flower to flower … [that] superior, withdrawn, roving mind of yours is a piece of arrogance’ (393–4). Affect of Social Shame Awara Masiha (translated as the Great Vagabond), the biography of Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, is one of Indian literature’s most famous biographies. The author, the noted litterateur Vishnu Prabhakar, describes the process of collecting material on Chattopadhyay’s life in 1959 (when many who knew Chattopadhyay were still alive) in the following terms: ‘A friend who had held a very high position as a government official smiled indulgently and said,

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“Why labour over it? Pick up four goons from any street and write about them. Saratchandra’s biography will be ready”’ (Prabhakar 2003, viii). To take one more example, among several, of the overall middle-class reaction to him: ‘In Rangoon a man told me, “He had lived with a woman of questionable reputation. Few people ever came to meet him. I was his neighbour but I never ventured into his room. He took opium and drank heavily. He led a low type of life. I always avoided him”’(ix). In Srikanta, this sense of social shame pervades memory, even if it is not immediately apparent. As quoted above, the novel begins from a later moment in life (‘fading afternoon of my wandering life’) and then lapses into childhood. Though there are occasional comments from the vantage point of the older Srikanta, for the most part the novel is straightforward in its chronology. But in this very structure of memory, something of the present colours the past—the past cannot exist purely in and of itself. And hence the selection of events contains a measure of unconscious teleology regarding dominant motifs such as social consciousness and shame. Let us begin with the first encounter of social stigma. When he was a boy, Srikanta comes under the influence of someone a little older than him—Indranath. Indra, as he is called by Srikanta, was a scrappy boy, getting into fights, indifferent to school. Indra appears in Srikanta’s life first as a saviour from other bullying boys. In a moment of courage, Srikanta stands his ground and refuses to run away from bullies. But soon a larger group descends on him, and Indra helps him get away. This establishes solidarity and gratitude. Indra not only tempts Srikanta with hemp, and cigarettes, but also ‘aroused the wanderlust that must have lain dormant within me’ (4). Srikanta’s response to Indra is ambiguous—did he feel ‘liking or aversion?’ (6). Attraction has an admixture of repulsion, desire, attachment, and gratitude. There is no simple moral abacus. Indra is a daring hero—a halo of invulnerability surrounds him. He mentors

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Srikanta in keeping social judgment in abeyance—Indra drops out of school, but instead of feeling ashamed he insouciantly indulges in flute-playing, in fishing at night in the swirling Ganga, in physical prowess and fearlessness, in the imaginativeness of his pranks, and in his ever-ready smile. It is the inequality of their friendship that allows the story to unfold—he leads and Srikanta follows. Boyhood has a special salience and pathos in the novel: the magnetism of Indra is because he is the other side of the sorry conventional tale of schoolchildren in a lower-middle-class, rural family—almost all of these students hate studying in such ill-cared-for institutions but dare not do anything about it. The constant cycle of the anxiety of exams surfaces the frictions of the many siblings in Srikanta’s family as well as the larger, fretful clan with its quarrelling adults. Through Indra, Srikanta espies the possibility of a flight from the pettiness of this school–examination world—there is the beckoning world of the river beyond the closed-in world of the school and blackboard. This entrenched sense of flight into boyhood adventure makes one feel as if the novel itself should be read in a single, ecstatic breath. The later life of travel in Srikanta retains this intermingled sense of terror, claustrophobia, and flight. Srikanta is enticed into a harrowing ride through the foaming river at night: The vision of riding high on that crest of a wave on that dark rainy night was so alluring that when I came to the edge of the Gosain Bagan I did not falter for an instant. Like one possessed I walked through that dense jungle to where the Ganga swirled and foamed between steep banks of rock under a leaden sky. (11)

After swirling through the river, Srikanta is in a daze, having barely survived. But he hardly has time to recover for they spot the corpse of a young boy in the adjacent forest. Indra wishes to give the boy a proper burial instead of letting the corpse be eaten by nearby jackals.

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Srikanta is aghast: to touch a corpse, that too of unknown caste (one may recall the similar incident from Shekhar). But Indra avers that corpses have no caste, and this originality of thought strikes Srikanta as courageous. What he begins to learn from Indra is not just physical but also moral courage, as well as independent thought. And he soon learns even more about social taboo. Sometime later, Indra takes him to smoke opium with Rahim, a Muslim snake-charmer with a house deep in the forest. The man lives with an upper-caste Hindu woman, whom Indra respectfully calls Didi (sister). Annada Didi is introduced dramatically—she expertly handles a visiting cobra that has frightened Indra. Though ostracized for living with someone from another community, she is portrayed as fearless and loving. Indra has brought Srikanta to this house, but it is now Srikanta who discerns an innate nobility in Didi that Indra had not appreciated. Didi is affectionate (despite the strain of living with an abusive husband) and clearly hopes for more affection from Indra, but Indra has come to the house only to learn the art of charming snakes. Didi is the first in a long line of women in the novel who recognize something sympathetic in Srikanta’s attentive listening: ‘I’ll believe every word you say, Didi’ (35). He gives her five rupees, which she later returns untouched. Srikanta witnesses physical violence between husband and wife, and learns with horror what it means to be isolated, stigmatized, and unprotected. An image of a primordially wounded woman takes root in him and conditions his later response to similarly ostracized women. However, this is the beginning of some of the inadequacies in his understanding of gender and religion—fallenness (even if noble) is irredeemably linked to her conversion to Islam. Further, the woman—though allowed to express hurt—must be imaged as ultimately forgiving of her husband. Didi had told Indra and Srikanta that the husband was himself a convert from Brahminism. After this conversation, she leaves Srikanta and Indra—the first of many people who simply leave Srikanta and thus

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permanently exit the narrative. Srikanta’s travels are as much about responding to being left-behind, about being travelled away from, as they are about agency and leave-taking. Srikanta does receive a last letter from Annada Didi. In it, she tells him that her ex-Brahmin husband had earlier murdered her elder sister and absconded. He had then converted to Islam and become a snake charmer—perhaps this was simple disguise or a way of tussling with his conscience. But she had recognized him and insisted on living with him even though he was completely ostracized. The tone of the novel here (clearly eulogizing wifely fidelity) seems to clutch at the lurid stereotypes of religion, murder, and the profession of the snake charmer. There is little self-consciousness in such characterization—the narrative tone seems continuous with Srikanta’s attitude towards Annada Didi. Indra too mysteriously disappears from his life soon after Annada Didi, forcing Srikanta to wonder at the role Indra played in his life. The adventures with Indra clarify a trope that will be repeated—a terrified protagonist, timid at heart, nevertheless embarks on enterprises that more courageous people would not attempt. Srikanta is receptive to complex, fearful experiences in a way that a simple swashbuckling hero would not bother to be. An inner region of courage is carved out; a nonchalant adventurer such as Indra would not stop to introspect such an unforced, unselfconscious courage. But Srikanta, for whom such courage is atypical, is forced to feel and think his way through a world that he did not create or choose—this forces an emotional growth and sympathy. Throughout the novel, Srikanta seems to ‘do’ things, even though he bemoans being ‘trapped in my own passivity and incapacity for action’ (289). This passivity is overplayed in the narrative and his agency is correspondingly underplayed—this is a structural feature of the novel. Sometimes the images of inaction are stark: ‘A wave of self-pity swept over me. I saw myself as a worthless parasite—weak, vulnerable!’ (304). There is no simple understanding of agency here—a self traveling freely throughout the

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world, demanding that the world open up its secrets. Rather, his agency is ambiguous because he is so susceptible to be led—a trend begun with his following Indra. Later, women lead him through diverse experiences and feelings. One cannot pinpoint responsibility or clearly register what Srikanta might have felt as he acted. Actions, even courageous ones such as navigating swollen rivers (and later, staying behind to tend people during a cholera epidemic), often take place in a narrative mist, and with a peculiar dissociative affect, not unlike the hemp constantly consumed. Childhood is a cloud of vanishing fragrance and misconstructed memory. The subjectivity in the novel is a strange mixture of action and hazy awareness, the latter never quite rising to the point of a fully responsible, wholly claimed self-consciousness. The intense homo-social love for Indra and the feelings of trust, awe, being protected, and learning from another do not return to Srikanta after childhood. After Indra leaves, Srikanta is suddenly adult and does not return to the mode of a reverential learner. Is his new stoic growth forced, or is it simply the result of his processing of grief and loss, or his sense of fate? One remarks on this because without a sense of agency and responsibility, it is hard to understand his negotiation of intense personal and social shame. And it is the indeterminacy of agency that allows Srikanta’s subjectivity the mist-like, dissociative, narcissistic, and parasitic affect that is so paradoxically productive in his candid encounters with others. By being so open, he opens a fuller social world to readers—the world of the marginal that would normally not have yielded itself so easily to the typical judgmental babu. It is well to remember Levinas’s insistence that responsiveness (of the same root as ‘responsibility’) is not passivity but a more attentive kind of agency. After Indra and Annada Didi, the next significant character Srikanta meets is Pyari Bai/Rajlakshmi, the female protagonist of the novel. While accompanying a minor prince on a hunt, Srikanta is invited to the prince’s camp where there is a singer. It is a louche setting—dancing

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girls, silken cushions, velvet, drugs, alcohol, and elephants outside. A young woman from Patna, ‘procured at great expense’, was singing enchantingly, focusing chiefly on Srikanta (57). One discovers again the novel’s fascination with disguise and conversion—Pyari Bai was the 23-year-old Brahmin widow Rajlakshmi from Srikanta’s village, a playmate of his childhood. It takes a while for Srikanta to learn this, as she has been presented so differently—a sophisticate entertainer at a salon. The world of appearance is temporarily deceptive—there is a lack of recognition, but when one finally recognizes, the object of that recognition as well as the Subject-recognizer have both changed. Pyari Bai/Rajlakshmi says that she has known him for a long time, but Srikanta is at first unable to remember. The story unfolds slowly in the telling: after a young widowhood, Rajlakshmi was taken on a pilgrimage to Kashi and assumed dead when she did not return. This was not an unusual practice, as it essentially gave a woman the opportunity to abscond and try and start another life instead of living the restrictive life of a young widow. So Rajlakshmi becomes Pyari, a courtesan. The Brahmin woman turning courtesan seems to have been a stock fantasy of the time—for example, there is Premchand’s 1919 novel Sevasadan (The House of Service). In both these novels, the love of the male protagonists is inseparable from the questions of shame and social stigma associated with the despised/fascinating figure of the courtesan. The novel can thus end happily only if the courtesan can revert to something pure such as social service, as in Premchand. To his credit, however, Premchand used the situation to make a larger point against the injustice and silencing of (uppercaste) women. But one of the advances of Srikanta is that it keeps the courtesan character in play (notwithstanding the constant claim of Pyari/Rajlakshmi to live a more pious life)—there is no final retirement to a world of professional social service. In Srikanta, the story of a young Rajlakshmi’s suffering is less important than the affirmation of her primordial love for a childhood

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companion. Later, as the courtesan Pyari Bai, she tells him that ‘the love one bears in childhood is never lost … [you] have held me in the hollow of [your] hand since my earliest childhood’; Srikanta’s forgetting may be linked to the earlier claim that he often ‘forgets the most significant things’ (68). This sentiment of childhood love and attendant misrecognition is significant throughout Chattopadhyay’s literary career, as it is the sanctity of childhood that protects love through all the tribulations and betrayals that follow. One might recall that the first volume of Srikanta and the hugely influential Devdas (centred on similar themes of betrayed childhood love) were both published in 1917. But this sentimentalism is at the cost of the woman’s voice—where there may have been pain or rage, there is just inexplicable love for someone who scarcely remembers her. In fact, Srikanta says that ‘I was so little aware of you that forgetting you was the most natural thing in the world. In fact I’m surprised that I remember you now’ (69). The forgetting and remembering seems rather a heartless, masculinist posture. For Srikanta, childhood was an exuberant physical and homo-social masculinist fantasy—boys playing at adventure and risk, traveling down rivers by moonlight, the water-foam cold on their skin, wild forests all around. A girl’s presence would have only confused the narrative atmosphere, so Pyari/Rajlakshmi was not introduced alongside Indra, even though they inhabited the same space and time frame. Pyari/Rajlakshmi’s image casts a retrospective shadow on Annada Didi, and the two woman-images are inseparable. Srikanta wonders how this mixing happened in his psyche, for the two women seem to inhabit utterly different niches—one was a ‘renunciant, [the other an] erotic extravaganza’ (74). The two niches seem to merge because they completed each other and probed each other to the farthest. His love for each, though intense, feels—in some important way—also sundered, undermined by the complementary image. He remarks that ‘my head was bowed in shame [but] my

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soul danced on a wave of ecstasy’ (74). Did this shame enter an inmost self, filling up subjectivity, arranging the contents of selfanalysis? As the literary scholar Udaya Kumar notes with regard to the Malayalam poet Kumaran Asan, ‘The construction of a masculine identity … paradoxically, is carried out through the elaboration of the female subject’s desiring interiority’ (Kumar 2017, 105). Powerful un-mastered affects, such as shame, make the first claim on Srikanta’s growing sense of separateness from the babu world in terms of both livelihood and marriage. Soon, neither Srikanta nor Pyari/Rajlakshmi can unabashedly claim marriage or domesticity. Srikanta is incapable of declaring simple, husbandly, monogamous love (and the circumstances are such that Pyari/Rajlakshmi cannot credibly claim or even desire this). Their inability to play these domestic roles is partly due to social censure, but the achievement of the novel is to take this formulaic situational tragedy and use its melancholy to provide both protagonists a richer sense of power (over each other and the world). Though linked, they share different experiences and trajectories, keep meeting fortuitously, understanding each time that other partners have claims on both. In contrast to her powerful and wealthy patrons, Srikanta is only erratically employed and keeps altering his means of livelihood. By being unfit for social roles, they are both uprooted, and though the pain of an instability remains, they discover that their nomadism fattens on the ruins of their domestic and professional incapacity. Masculinist Wanderlust Narrative The Nausea has stayed over there, in the yellow light. I am happy: this cold is so pure, this darkness is so pure; am I myself not a wave of icy air? … I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes, except a little empty purity. —Sartre (2000 [1938], 43–5; capitalization in original)

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I have never had a goal before me for as long as I can remember. Nor have I desired anything with passion or conviction. Consequently, I have lived my life in another’s shadow. —Chattopadhyay (2009, 411)

The desire in Srikanta for wide-ranging experiences takes him far away from his village landscape—in new lands, there are prospects of livelihood and money, but also—crucially—love. Travel, for him and the many characters who move away from their natal home, is chiefly a mode of action and healing, a response to claustrophobia and censure. Willingly buffeted by the currents of fate, Srikanta’s need for employment takes him to Burma. Burma was then a part of the British Indian empire and had a large Indian diaspora. Despite the racism of the immigration officers, Srikanta keeps in good cheer by enjoying his view of the wide Ganges and observing and talking to fellow passengers. There is a storm on the way, but the overall benign vision of the novel ensures that nothing profoundly unhappy will occur. Indeed, Srikanta takes rather needless risks with the storm in a spirit of happy aimlessness. Perhaps that happy aimlessness may occasionally be seasoned with the malaise of a sharper despair, but this seasoning is carefully controlled. Srikanta stands in the teeth of a cyclone as he ‘had never seen one [before]’, courting death (128). It is less a serious death wish and more a thrill at the miracle of embodiment and perception, of the happy keenness of finitude. One thinks of the Kantian sublime, which has just this image of being on a ship in the middle of a storm. But Srikanta is not just in awe of a transcending sublimity—he deftly inserts himself into it (while the aesthetic sublime in Kant is essentially non-human). Srikanta seems to welcome death. But the gesture lacks true seriousness and is more in line with his boyhood escapades with Indra. Srikanta essentially knows that he is safe in his travels—nature will not wound him, and even diseases such as

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cholera cannot maim him as there will always be a woman who will appear miraculously to take care of him. For the most part, this woman is Pyari/Rajlakshmi. The novel is strongly moored in this overall architecture of cosmic benignity—it is a thinly secularized religious faith, if secularized at all. There is never really a marked threat to Srikanta’s life—it is, after all, structured as a long reminiscence. But the stakes for others are sharper and higher. Srikanta skims from danger to danger, if not blithely then with no enduring interior strain. The morning after the storm, he jests with the doctor who is attending to the dead bodies sprawled over the deck. The reader too, identifying with Srikanta, is taken to the verge of death but is assured that she will be ably manoeuvred back, and that she will only be given a disaster-tourist’s view of death. Far from the Kantian annihilation of ego and sense of a greater vastness, one has a rather loquacious Srikanta who appropriates disaster for a good conversation piece. Storms become only stories to be told by firelight while drinking tea in a village-shop. The reader feels safe, and her faith in an inscrutable beneficence is assured. Related to this cosmic beneficence is the easy sociality, the endless open encounters with strangers, that vitalizes the narrative. Srikanta can easily talk to anyone, man or woman, of any class or profession, and many seek him out as he looks kind, curious, and helpful. This again is an easily assumed privilege of educated male travel. One must credit Srikanta a certain restlessness, a repudiation of a secure clerical existence. But while travel takes a certain defiance, it must be remembered that only men could travel alone, freely, and without the immediate imputation of looseness that a woman would have incurred in the early part of the 20th century. Men can initiate conversations freely with men and women, but women could not initiate such conversations if they were unaccompanied. Pyari/ Rajlakshmi always had to have her domestic help and entourage with her—they provide safety, but also attenuate her privacy and solitude.

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Men can assume physical safety and even medical care if they fall ill in a strange land. It would be relatively implausible within a realist novel to have a man nurse a single woman in as selfless (not to say as thorough) a way as Pyari/Rajlakshmi continually nurses Srikanta. This nursing may not be without a certain eroticism, though it remains an unexplored novelistic direction to speculate if there could not be a similar homoerotic encounter with a male nurse. If travel is inseparable from the risks of illness and abandonment, it is not as if these risks do not exist for those who stay behind. The young man who dies, contra the safely healthy Srikanta, is Gahar. Gahar was Srikanta’s childhood friend from his village. Gahar is introduced only in the last volume—the largest volume of the four that make up the novel. Srikanta describes him as ‘eccentric’, importune, and loving; a landlord who gifted away land to the poorer tenants (337). When Srikanta visits the village, Gahar insists that Srikanta accompany him to his house. On the way, he updates Srikanta: Gahar had lost his parents and wife, and spent his time developing his religious poetry. Srikanta thinks uncharitably of this poetry, calling the ideas ‘trite’, the rhymes ‘doggerel’ (338). Gahar aims no less than to compose a version of the Ramayana, and Srikanta figuratively rolls his eyes at the prospect of a whole night of bad poetry. Srikanta is irritated at having to walk through dust, bramble, snake and jackalinfested rural Bengal, and with Gahar reciting pastoral poetry by his side. Srikanta notes that ‘he was the same Gahar, the simple unaffected boy of nature he had always been. His delight at our reunion was genuine and heartfelt’ (340). But Srikanta also wonders at the failure of Gahar’s life: My heart was saddened as I watched him leave the room. I realized that his ambition of a lifetime would never be fulfilled. No one would publish his work. Nor would anyone read it. … I had known instantly that they [Gahar’s poetry] held no promise. He had inherited a love

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of poetry from his fakir ancestors but had done nothing to cultivate it. He had little education and no knowledge of what lay outside his native village. (343)

For Srikanta, it is only travel that is the true education and bildung, the broadening of one’s understanding of both society and culture. But is Srikanta right in writing off Gahar’s life and values? Gahar had a secure home in life and gets one in death too—he is buried under the mango tree by the river, one that he had played under all his life. He dies in the rose–apple season that was dear and familiar to him. This home in life and death is the antithesis of Srikanta’s quest: Srikanta travels but can find no home, no still point at the centre of the universe that might mark his final resting place, his funeral pyre, and there will be no relative to light that fire or mourn his passing. By the terms of the novel, Gahar is constructed as the unhappy foil to Srikanta: Gahar had stayed in the village, had not travelled, and hence his poetic work was considered derivative and feeble. Though Gahar’s naiveté has its charm and he was generous in giving away land to the poor, it was also a type of mental suicide that now literalized itself in the body—Gahar admits great loneliness, suffers from unrequited love, and would soon cough his way to death. Srikanta always recovers from illness—even when he falls ill helping people with cholera, Pyari/Rajlakshmi emerges to care for him. Gahar has no one, though he lived in the same village all his life and had done so many good turns for so many. His fate seems absurd: he goes to help his tenants and dies of some obscure fever that he contracts from them. The old male servant who looks after Gahar has fealty but not Pyari/Rajlakshmi’s healing and loving touch. Though Srikanta is constructed as someone who actively repudiates a life of material goods and security, it is also critical to the novel that he does not meet Gahar’s fate, that is, a fate of immobility, stunted education, and thus a lack of self-knowledge and foredoom despite personal

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generosity, innocence, and goodwill. It is no surprise that for Gahar the only nutritive space was that of the nearby Vaishnava ashram, where people were welcomed freely and spent their time singing and working. Even for Srikanta, this ashram becomes a temporary relief from his travel and rented room: he feels far from the ‘boredom and isolation of my lodgings in Calcutta’ (369). The ashram is a space of rest for both the traveller and the perennially rooted. Travel for Srikanta seems agential, and full of risk and danger. Even the telling of the story is not an active marking of the world with a self, but rather a quiescence that spontaneously unfolds itself as a life. There are acts of courage in cholera epidemics where he cares for the ill without worrying about infection. There are nights in the middle of a sea-storm. These are marked moments of courage and agency; and yet, the self-perception of Srikanta—and many of the other characters—is that his is a life ‘without energy and enthusiasm’ (472). What is this complex imagination of agency in relation to a rich life, full of incident? For how does it come to be that acts that need energetic willing (travel, breaking taboos, and so on) are seen by the narrator as unreal and passive, and have him feeling that he lacks energy and enthusiasm? This may be interpreted as modesty, true or feigned, but this reading would like to pursue a different interpretation: it is the idea that a life or a novel may be expected to unfold in a fuller richness if the subject takes on an attitude of detachment or dispassion. This might be a paradox: the more one steps away from life, suspends immediate reaction and judgment, the more the stream of life and possibilities seems to grow in colour and dimension. Srikanta is a listener and non-judgmental absorber of stories—of Pyari/Rajlakshmi’s, of Gahar’s, and of Annada Didi’s. Listening is its own unusual kind of agency, the way into other people’s minds, and thus into possibilities that one may live out indirectly, possibilities that one’s life forecloses, perhaps due to the questions of identity-markers, such

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as gender, caste, able-bodiedness, and so on. This absorption of stories, especially tales of pain, is an inwardizing process, and it is this conglomeration of empathy, complicity, and detachment that makes up Srikanta’s consciousness. It is this quality of listening, rather than mere physical movement, that is his truer travel and learning. He travels not for the sake of travel but so that he may meet more unusual people and gather their stories; these stories multiply his life. This raises questions of the self ’s double-edged sovereignty: on the one hand, Srikanta’s traveling-self is a movement that does not possess anything—either kingdoms or love or worldliness. It seems a renunciation of mastery. On the other hand, travel may be an ultimate mastery—the world is one’s kingdom, every path an experience that one can possess, a constant aggrandizement of memory and consolidation. Nomadicism is this complex play of renunciation and consolidation. Neither he who stays (Gahar) nor she who flees/exits (Indra, Annada Didi) can quite match up to that delicate dialectic of movement and absorption that Srikanta and Pyari/Rajlakshmi manage. Nomadicism does not mean solitude, but a seriality of others who haunt the subject, be they proximate or far away. The self-other dyad (be it friendship, love, or admiration) is asymmetric, and there is always a transfer of knowledge, experience, feeling, and mood. Srikanta absorbs more than he gives, and he shares this absorption with the reader. It is the indeterminacy of activity and passivity that makes Srikanta fascinating, and the sensuality of the relationships such as that shared by Srikanta and Pyari/Rajlakshmi is this entanglement of surrender and agency. The last scenes of the novel are set in the Vaishnavite ashram. Srikanta confesses that ‘planning to leave and staying behind had become a habit. A tremendous lassitude overtook me and I could not move’ (407). He constantly reaffirms his dependence on the hospitality of both Pyari/Rajlakshmi and the ashram. The Vaishnava religion is understood by him as correlate with his languor and

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lassitude. The idyllic world of the ashram as well as the person of Kamal Lata, an inhabitant there, enchant him. Like Pyari/ Rajlakshmi, Kamal Lata is both worldly and virginal, religious and seductive. Lassitude is this sense of the luxury of time: prayer-hour follows prayer-hour, only to be interrupted by food and song. This is the final chapter of the novel, and it is fitting that it ends with rest rather than travel, and with piety instead of shame. There is a sense of expansiveness: the French philosopher Henri Bergson writes that what ‘we called the passing of time was only the steady sliding of the screen and the gradually obtained vision of what lay waiting, globally, in eternity’ (Bergson 2014, 264). When Srikanta leaves the ashram, there is a sense that the novel is achieving completion—he walks past his childhood village, sees how much the old trees have grown older still and how decayed are the houses that in his youth were filled with work, prayer, and laughter. This sense of completion, of the parlaying of the life cycle, takes him, predictably, back to Pyari/Rajlakshmi. In her unconditional nursing of him, she may not have been essentially different from any of the other women in the novel. Her love is inseparable from his chronic need. The nomad’s only home is the charity of the female lover whose home itself keeps moving; it is only at particular times that their wanderings overlap. There is the final re-turn to shared togetherness and old memories, for Pyari/Rajlakshmi recounts the story of their childhood in a more detailed fullness. It is unabashedly horrific— about being sold as a child, about a mother who part-wanted her girl child to die. Srikanta says that he hopes that Pyari Bai/Rajlakshmi will eventually get someone worthy of her: ‘a strong man—tough as a betel nut; a man no one can get the better of; a yes-man who never learned the word ‘no’; a man who can look after himself and you and your money; a man who never falls sick, never gets lost, never—’ (456). This conventional masculine and husbandly power is of course the opposite of Srikanta’s wandering, passive maleness.

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It is his estrangement from this norm that is the reason why Srikanta was attractive to so many women in the first place, including Pyari/ Rajlakshmi. His was a masculinity built on an ability to bring out stories, to articulate promises and fantasies, and to allow the play of socially marginalized but strong female voices. The absence of a sense of possession of people or their stories is what makes Srikanta distinct. The sentimentality he conveys allows space for the simultaneous presence of many women and men in his life. If he shows no possessiveness, the women cannot really either. Indeed he cannot show possessiveness, for he often meets them in their spaces—he is the wanderer, they are the refuge or host. But when he is with them, there is also a dissociated, non-possessive, egalitarian feeling, a sense of happily dropping anchor in a tiny island in the ocean. Perhaps this idea of dissociative flotation and safety is not so different from the Vaishnavite ideal of play. It requires a certain courage to want nothing, to gather nothing, not even the memory of past homes and past actions. It is thus no surprise that Srikanta feels his life ‘unreal’; and yet with equal truth he can claim to have lived, through the compassion and wisdom of others even more vulnerable than him, a far fuller life than the typical, unexposed clerical babu. Embodiment and Paralysis One can sense the complexity of this relation of shame, flight, and love by comparing Chattopadhyay with his illustrious elder contemporary and inspiration, Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941). Though the estimation of Tagore’s novelistic oeuvre continues to be underdeveloped with regard to his poetry, this section will just take the example of Malancha (translated as The Garden), a novelette that is largely overlooked even within Tagore’s novelistic oeuvre. Yet, The Garden is a signal achievement in its exploration of shame, illness, and dependence, all of them strong themes in Srikanta. Neerja is

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a woman who lies immobilized by her illness, her room overlooking her private garden. Here, it is the woman who needs nursing, contra Srikanta, and indeed her husband Aditya was for many years a perfect nurse. Neerja daily watches the gardener and Aditya work on their garden. The first ten years of their love had found its dwelling and nourishment in that garden. It was a time when she was well, and their love blossomed in their shared, anxious care of sprouts and flowers, in their sipping of tea amidst the slanted pillars of sunlight. Each day seemed to contain whole seasons, as the garden was both a workspace and a space for romance and sociality, where friends dropped in, and conversations floated amid leaves and birds. These friends would be generously gifted large pots of flowers or fruit when they left. It was a happy time, now remembered with the keenest sense of loss. Illness is an abyss, and those days of health now seemed primordial, of another temporal order altogether. This illness seems obscurely related to the fact that she and Aditya do not have children. She had been pregnant once, but the child had to be sacrificed to save the mother. This so shattered Neerja that she hardly recovered, and so she continued to stay in bed long after the doctors had permitted her to return to her daily routine. For a long time then, Neerja lies on the bed, in a sometimes blank, sometimes unhappy state of trepidation regarding the future. This paralysis of body and life changes with the appearance of Sarala, Aditya’s distant cousin. Sarala was presumably there to help Aditya manage the complex business of the garden. However, sensing their growing closeness, this becomes inevitably difficult for Neerja. Sarala is attractively clothed and is confident in her knowledge of the garden-business. Neerja begins to watch their intimacy with alarmed helplessness. It is a striking image, cutting through the pages of the novelette—a paralyzed woman watching her husband’s growing infatuation with a healthy young woman as the latter two walk through a beautifully landscaped garden. There is

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readymade pathos. In earlier times, when Sarala was only an occasional visitor, all three of them would dance in the garden, with the gramophone playing exotic foreign records. Now Neerja fears that her brain, self-control, and moral sanity would decay and atrophy just as her legs had. The sap of bitterness rises from within her, and she begins to pester her domestic help with questions such as how much time had Aditya been spending with her rival. This bitterness was exacerbated by a nostalgia that was also growing sharper in her memory—a forgotten time of love, health, energy, entrepreneurship, lordship over servants, and saris from Dhaka. She now feels herself gradually disappearing: little by little her husband starts forgetting to do small things for her, things he had never earlier forgotten, such as bringing a flower for her from the garden every morning. As if to make matters worse, Sarala once brings the flower. There is a difficult encounter between the women. Neerja uses the occasion to scold Sarala for her ignorance and incompetence in the garden. Sarala is sympathetic of the situation—Neerja lying surrounded by her garden, a proximity that whets rather than fulfils. Neerja’s bedroom is a space so close to (and yet irredeemably far from) the garden’s freshly fragrant grass; the nearness of that grass only reminds her further of the horizontality and the deep indoor quality of illness. Neerja’s physical posture of bed-rest is a direct image of paralysis, need, impotence—hers is a particular, physical kind of shame. In Srikanta, illness is rarely worth dwelling on and only serves instrumental functions—it is either a plot-device to get Pyari/Rajlakshmi to reappear for him, or is conceived as a tribute to Srikanta’s heroism—only he is brave enough to go to the cholera-stricken village. Illness is not developed as an interiority, a space from which escape is difficult, a void that sprouts dark flowers. Illness is not conceived as an existential moment—a risk of death, or a risk of irredeemable and abyssal affect. But in The Garden (in contrast to Srikanta) illness is conceived in these excessive, overflowing terms. It is not just about

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the functionality of everyday movement, or the business of livelihood in the garden. Rather, it is a sense of the endless—Neerja may never recover, and indeed, if she survives, she has to fashion a new identity as a paralytic. This was the case even before Sarala’s appearance. With Sarala, there is a more complete discovery of shame and loathing (of self, the husband, the rival, the world), a loathing that must create the world in the image of her singular suffering. Here again, it is affect in its excess that cannot be reduced to the addition of its parts—rage, shame, hate. Her illness is irredeemable, closer to the irredeemable illness of Shashi’s wounds—a death has already been projected backward into those last days of living within a wounded body. Tagore’s plotting allows this inter-braiding of a desperate love and all the negative affects associated with making it impossible to separate the personal, the moral, the romantic, and the workaday. This claustrophobia would be the nightmare of Srikanta, but as said, Srikanta operates within an overall vision of an ultimately benign universe. Though there are other points of view, these are overpowered by the centrality of Neerja’s emotional vantage point. To all purposes, Aditya’s grief (partly in a confused response to her emotions) begins to build a wall between him and Neerja, which further spirals and confirms her alienation. Earlier, her sorrow had served to bring them closer together. Her body is thus at the other end of the spectrum with regard to the sovereign, mobile body of Srikanta (indeed the sovereignty was in the mobility, the willed nomadicism). Illness becomes only a resting place for further consolidations of love, and thus serves as the spur for further travel. It does not matter if this travel is imaged as linear (more and more towns and countries), or cyclical (to return again and again to Pyari/Rajlakshmi). In Tagore, female domesticity is literalized in its full horror of this state of immobility. The bed lies at the farthest fringe of the world. Heaven, which exists only in this world, is the garden next door, glimpsed everyday through the open

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window. If there is the possibility of nursing, it is when Sarala offers to nurse Neerja, but such same-sex nursing has none of the erotic or stabilizing functions that the act has in Srikanta. Other characters are also trapped by this situation: Aditya is unable to tell Sarala to leave. He thinks that even if the truth of his love for Sarala has come so circuitously (through the painful fact of Neerja’s illness), now that it has come, it cannot be disavowed. To lose Sarala would be to lose not just love (a love that may help him heal from the trauma of Neerja’s illness) but also his capacity for work and hope. Neerja oscillates between the traditional posture of asking for her husband’s forgiveness and, in the same breath, berating him for hard-heartedness. At one point, she tries to take the higher moral ground by giving Sarala her jewellery. This is confusing to everyone, most of all to Sarala, who then curses the god ‘to whom I prayed twice a day. This [prayer] too ceases as of now’ (Tagore 2011, 1072). No giving is without taint, no expenditure is without reserve, for the ‘heart held something back’ (1072). Neerja replies that grief can never empty itself such that the heart can be left entirely pure and vacant. At one point, she seizes Sarala’s hand and calls her a witch, and says that she (Neerja) will live, if only to drain Sarala’s blood. Rarely have emotions been so nakedly displayed in Indian literature of any period, and this is a novel of the 1930s. It is thus not only precocious but, in many ways, unsurpassed in its rawness, a rawness that is not veiled by the rhetoric of female suffering and sacrifice—a lesson that writers such as Agyeya, otherwise deeply admiring of Tagore, tended to forget. Neerja says that she alone will supervise the restoration and growth of the garden till her death—death never seems far away. But then, her death, which might have given closure or release, does not take place in the diegetic space of the novel. The Garden is a perfect jewel with little of the verbosity that mars much of Tagore’s novelistic and essayistic prose. Even in theme, it is highly unusual. Neerja is not the selfless woman of the novelistic

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imagination—she is shown in visceral anger, pain, and hate. There is no Shashi-like moment of a haunting, primeval disappearance into death, an ethereality of pain that Shekhar creates and which suffuses the mood of the whole novel. Here, an ugly, human emotion will be all that perdures, not the silent, haunting eyes that stay alive even as the body dies. Even in Srikanta’s sumptuously crafted sentimentality, the woman appears as maternal and lover-like—stable, forgiving, and forever loving. In contrast, in The Garden, there is the rage of pain and injustice, of shame and accusation. Finitude is the only brute reality, and it pervades all love and life. The pain is in the last existential, beyond the romantic or the familial, sense of the immensity of solitude before an unjust death. It is an unrepentant raging against the heavens up until the very last moment of collapse. The garden next door is an infinity away and, whereas even a child can crawl, Neerja lies in absolute immobility, pinioned. The last author to be discussed in this book, Krishna Sobti, crafts an unprecedented oeuvre by playing on this fertile paradox of movement and stasis, of the boldness of speech and the silence of a depressive paralysis.

Fifth Study A Skein of Voices

No pleasure is ephemeral. —Goethe (Cited in Schmidt 2014, 509) Comrades, students, revolutionary intellectuals, small traders, toiling women, pick up a stick, an axe, sickle, hammer or whatever else, in your hands that you have for years used only to vote. —Ajitha (2008, 137) This is not a situation of bilingualism or multilingualism. We can easily conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogenous system in equilibrium. … But this is not how great authors proceed. … They do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language. … What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minoritize this language, much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium … they make the language take flight, they Inlays of Subjectivity: Affect and Action in Modern Indian Literature. Nikhil Govind, Oxford University Press (2019). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780199498727.003.0005

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send it racing along a witches line. … This means that a great writer is always a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. … He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur. —Deleuze (1997, 109–10; italics in original)

One of the acknowledged virtuosos of the narrative voice in Indian literature is Krishna Sobti (1925–2019). Winner of the Jnanpith (2017), India’s most prestigious literary award, Sobti has been justly acclaimed for her ability to write in different dialectal variants of Hindi. Almost every novel of Sobti’s displays a distinctive use of Hindi—some novels are inflected with Rajasthani, some by the Urdu of Old Delhi, others by rural or urban Punjabi, and so on (Dalmia 2013). However, the idea of voice in this chapter has less to do with any sort of linguistic ethnography and more with indexing various registers of subjectivation. For example, Memory’s Daughter, a novel originally published in 1958, already foregrounds the use of voice in a complex way. It starts with a disembodied voice of blessing: ‘Jeeyein, jaagein [live long, awake]! The good and the bad, my own and others, everyone who is mine, anyone who was ever mine. … Let them all live, let them thrive’ (5). This voice has no clear location—it is not clear who is speaking or what the context is. The voice is also of mixed and confusing affect—it is a blessing, but it remarks that just a little while ago it wanted everyone dead—Sobti’s famous humour is in play! It is only many pages later that even the basic spatio-temporal coordinates of the voice are made clear. The giveaway sentence is ‘rumours about the brilliant military commander Ranjit Singh’, which places the novel in the early 19th century (59). For much of the novel, the voice has an aerial quality that seems to fly over the military turrets of a barren north-western landscape. It is a voice in flight—a flight that embodies the movement and weight of the narrative as a whole—for the voice is a direct representation of the protagonist (Pashto, a young woman) who seems to hurtle at great

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speed from one inexorable horror to another. The reader slowly learns that Pashto has run away from home and has to constantly flee from all kinds of pursuers, including her vengeful natal family, the British, as well as the family she had married into. All this takes place in the bedlam of war—so there is the clamorous voice of war on the one hand and the fleeting, elusive voice of a spirited young woman on the other. The novel also achieves a circularity through the use of this device—it ends with the voice feebly conveying that it has been saved from an imminent and harsh death and restored to at least temporary safety. It may be recalled that Sobti wrote this novel in the 1950s, when the memory of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent was still painful and living, and many of its after-effects were still reshaping the demographics of various cities; many sites in northern India and Pakistan were host to thousands of abducted and abandoned women (Butalia 2017). The above thumbnail sketch of Memory’s Daughter was to illustrate the flexibility and versatility of Sobti’s use of the voice. A brief analysis of a much-later novel Listen Girl! (1991) will demonstrate how enduring this preoccupation with the registers of voice was to Sobti’s oeuvre. On the occasion of its English translation in 2002, Sobti added a Foreward to Listen Girl! The Foreward functions as a frame-text on how the novel came to be written: Sobti writes of her increasing consciousness of the precariousness of memory and her acute sense of the loss of personhood in a moment of crisis—her mother was in the intensive care unit, and this was to be her mother’s final illness. This sequence of stress, memory, and exhaustion led to a moment of internal othering: ‘I felt I was not me, there was another living within’ (Sobti 2002, 8). This other living within one consisted of a scrapbook of old images whose origin she could not quite place. Alongside the voice, there seemed the subterranean emergence of an older, archaic ‘image-track’—what was that herd of horses besides that mysterious river? Where was this river located? She then remembered that it was her mother who kept talking of riding horses—it

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was an image of freedom and power for her mother to sit atop a horse and gaze at nature from an elevated position. Her mother had wanted to ‘scale mountains—but where was the time? Your father’s household consumed every moment. Do you understand? … The family takes away all one has’ (9). The time of illness is a time of suspension, of the slow invasion of the weight of the unlived, unfulfilled past, of a life saturated by the demands of household drudgery. Time hangs heavy for both mother and daughter in that last hospital that seems to be on the edge of the world: ‘I watched the falling rain till late in the night, hearing only silences within me’ (9). The mother keeps calling Sobti ‘Ai Ladki ’ [Listen Girl!], and the conversation that follows this address takes place between two ‘fading and failing interiors’ (11). Sobti avers in the Foreward that one must hear such silences and words with ‘great restraint and merciless accuracy’ (12). Thus, the achievement of a sense of voice in Sobti has less to do with what is propositionally stated and more with achieving a certain oral timbre, a syntax that shapes the arteries of an affect. There is the maintenance of a restless, swirling combination of mood—irritation, frustration, fatigue, defensiveness, and need for assurance. There is a sense of the most ancient and primeval in the mother’s voice, older than the oldest history that may be read in a stone inscription, the voice that is a return to the childhood ear straining to hear and understand the mysterious, peremptory speech of elders. Oldness and repetition, the voice that addresses but talks past you—where the listener may only be a placeholder-listener needed to affirm that one is heard—is the case of the final deathbed voice of the mother. Memory is needed to believe that the past happened, and that this past was revelatory—every time an old story is repeated, it has fresh meaning and is thus a speech act rather than merely informative. The voice of the mother is further addled with medicines, her speech is additionally slurred, and her awareness of all this only makes it more desperate and urgent. What

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is ultimately trying to be communicated? Ageing, for all its hardships of illness or immobility, also generates compensatory freedoms. One of these freedoms is the role reversal, one that helps the young explore age and the aged revitalize their buried youth: ‘Our roles are reversed. You my daughter have now become my mother’ (16). As this is a book about voices, this change and reversal of age is also a change of voice. The older memories are sometimes stronger, supplanting the newer ones. One remembers a childhood in an evergreen forest where one rode horses, with the elders nodding sagely. One is only a birth away from being a male warrior, for being a woman has already prepared oneself for war: ‘If there’s such a thing as rebirth, then in my next birth, I’d like to be born a man. I’ll then know how a warrior on the move controls his wife and family’ (27). Yet, the warrior-to-be is for now waiting for death, or at least the nourishment of a good night’s sleep. Sleep is placental nourishment, a dark cosmos between births, a place for the return of old dreams: ‘how many years since I dreamt of my mother? [asks the protagonist’s mother]’ (19). The barely material voice of the mother is the trace that remains after the body has been jabbed with a hundred needles. The sleeping pills cause strange delusions, restlessness, and irritation: ‘when they are done all that’s left is the voice’ (20). A pharmaceutically induced netherworld of sleep is not always benign. The body is so helpless that even the panic and agency required for suicide is beyond it. Time is immobilized, a repetition, marked only by the meter of medication. Wakefulness is reduced to animality: ‘Your ma, ladki, has lost interest in everything except food and drink’ (34). But family itself produces a similar automation: ‘Hands acquire habits only when one has a family’ (37). One becomes a clock for one’s husband’s rituals (73). The book has only an internal sense of time, the hours hanging in that heavy intersubjective limbo between mother and daughter—it is not clear how long the illness has played out, and medical details are kept to a minimum. The authoritative voice of the doctor is

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absent, irrelevant. For the reader to hear all the voices in the novel, and the many intersecting pasts of mother and daughter, takes great energy. One can feel the breath and weight of the mother’s voice, the repetitive inward turn of a spiral. Beyond all details, all that is left is exhaustion—the novel of less than a 100 pages nevertheless has the burden of a tome. The rest of the chapter will discuss three of her novels in the order of their publication and in two sections. It is useful to compare To Hell with You, Mitro (2012; originally published in 1966) and Sunflowers in the Dark (2008; originally published in 1972) because though they were written within a few years of each other, they were focalized around widely different affects. To Hell with You, Mitro has long been lauded as the daring voice of a married woman freely asserting her sexuality in the closed world of a conservative family. The affect in Sunflowers in the Dark is very different—it is the muted voice (and equally masterfully crafted silence) of a woman speaking from a place of great pain and abuse. Sobti thus seems to have mastered both ends of the spectrum—voice, silence, as well as their inter-braiding; both courage and peace-making. The third and last section of this chapter will discuss in some detail a late Sobti novel—The Heart Has Its Reasons (2009; originally published in 1993). This novel, set in the Old Delhi of the 1920s, is an elaborately imagined dynamic between a lawyer, his wife and her children, and his mistress and her children. As those unfamiliar with these Sobti novels may get the plot-lines mixed up, the novels will be discussed sequentially. The principal themes remain fairly constant in the oeuvre: the play of voice and unflinching speech as they attempt to negotiate different kinds of restrictive structures (family, peer-groups, offices, and urban- and war-scapes). Sobti achieves all the nuances of self-conscious affect by having the voice shift registers—she reformulates the traditional bald, declarative, and realist sentence. In its stead, Sobti has all the main characters be self-conscious and verbally

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sophisticated. When they speak, there is always a rich entwining of undertone and overtone—further, layerings of melancholia, sarcasm, remorse, deprecation, and so on pile onto one other. Sobti unpicks readerly expectations, swiftly transfers perspective, and throws the reader media res into a hurtling story-line. Despite this complexity, something in her prose excites rapid reading, and the momentum of its voice is reminiscent of K. R. Meera’s Hangwoman. Boldness and Quietude There is an evolution of novelistic skills from Memory’s Daughter to To Hell with You, Mitro (henceforth, Mitro). Mitro demands a slower and more attentive reading, and the novel floats on a skein of voices. It is set in the dark, pulsing interiors of houses, thick with family rumours and resentments. The externalist world of Pashto (war) in Memory’s Daughter is now set in an interior scape in Mitro, but there is still the same criss-crossing jouissance of voice and self-fashioning in a hostile world. Almost all of the novel (like much of Sobti’s oeuvre) is a jostling back and forth of biting dialogue. There is only the barest context: often this context is as minimal as an adjective, a sort of stage-direction for the voice (sarcasm, intimacy, banter, mordancy). Correspondingly, there is only the thinnest description of the actual setting or unfolding of action; description and action mostly function as punctuation to the flow of voice. The novel seems to be happening in real-time, even if in actuality it is happening in a remote time or place. There is a relay of the selves of the novel—from the bare interiors of bedrooms to flickering, drifting psychic interiors. People are often reduced to these spoken voices, and the affect is not entirely or immediately locatable along the traditional axes of psychological biography, or social role, or class. At one level, Mitro is an archetype of the trapped housewife, but, equally and oppositely, through her sheer audacity, she manages to utterly re-define that locked-down role.

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The novel begins abruptly, and one is plunged into a world of age, ill-health, domesticity, parental fatigue, family resentment, and intrigue. It is a familiar, even stereotypic, world; but that perspective of claustrophobia is not the dominant note. Indeed, the novel is notable for its lack of a dominant moral authority: the elderly parents of the sons/husbands are bathetic, with the father resignedly awaiting death and the mother always looking helplessly at her sons for an assurance they are unable or unwilling to give. The sons treat the parents with indifference or indulgence or contempt. The familiar harassing voice of the mother-in-law is conspicuously absent. This absence of parental authority opens the novel to new possibilities and expectations. There is an air of expectancy. Mitro is introduced sensorially, to the sounds of physical violence from her husband: ‘her eyes flashing, her hair flying’ (Sobti 2012b, 10–11). Soon, one is informed of her angry screams, her habit of looking her husband and elders straight in the eye. Other characters are also introduced in quick succession; one learns that the parental couple has three sons, and each of these sons and their wives live with the older parental couple. The reader feels disoriented at all the names and in trying to gauge the relative strength of each person within the family. In the face of the feebleness of the parents, power within the household does not follow the conventional patterns of age and gender. Unlike the more tacit connection between mother and daughter in Listen Girl!, Mitro is more open regarding her similarity to her mother in their shared sexual boldness: ‘She [the mother] used to say that her Mitro had taken after the tehsildar [revenue officer] of the area. … Your brother-in-law does not understand my fever. At most, it is once a week or fortnight’ (19). Mitro, for her part, begins to ‘ride her dream horse’ of the ‘tall moustached form of Banwari’s [her brother-in-law’s] police inspector friend’ (20–1). And later ‘this youth is mine, all mine to flaunt. I didn’t go begging for it’ (22). The relationship of mother to daughter, especially in their defiance with

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regard to family and social convention, is a theme Sobti continually revisits. But Mitro’s house is also full of other bodily lusts—there is Phoolavanti, the younger daughter-in-law who constantly gorges on sweets—displayed through the daughters-in-law in their adornment and jewellery and constant comparisons of the wealth of their respective natal families to that of the husband’s family. What is anxiety for all is theatre and mirth for Mitro. Her ebullient personality is trapped within a system that hierarchizes over a range of contradictory parameters: age, gender, beauty, jewellery, cooking, and housekeeping skills, perceived relation to the husband, perceived love of the brothers’ father vis-à-vis each of the daughters-in-law, the husband’s status within the house, the social status and wealth of the natal family, the neighbourhood chatter, and so on. Mitro ‘thinks’ (in an example of a relay between the narratorial voice and Mitro’s voice) of her captivity thus: ‘Strange are the ways of this body. A drop leaves it as unquenched as the sea’ (45). In Mitro, as in Listen Girl! one of the causes of heartburn, beyond marital and domestic difficulty, is that none of the daughters-in-law have conceived. All of them have been deprived of the precious capital of motherhood that would have meant much in a crowded, competitive house. Mitro is not beyond taunting others for their lack of motherhood, even as she has no child herself. Sobti’s oeuvre is punctuated not just by the mother-daughter relationship but also the corollary that not all daughters will, in their turn, become mothers. Some daughters are indeed at the end of a genealogical line, and thus peculiarly vulnerable to shaming. Some of Sobti’s protagonists seem to choose this child-free life, though this is rarely directly thematized. Sometimes, this lack of children is linked (such as in Sunflowers in the Dark), though again without direct thematization, to childhood abuse, which may in turn be linked to not having a stable partner in adulthood. The childlessness (or the choice to not have children) exerts differential pressures depending on whether it is being articulated to

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the family (for example, in Listen Girl!) or to friends (for example, in Sunflowers in the Dark). The aloneness of dying is sometimes imaged as most akin to the aloneness of childlessness—though this is mostly by mothers, and particularly in Listen Girl! In Mitro, this childlessness is barely touched upon as an issue; all the investment is in the relationship with the mother, not the unborn child. The last scene of the novel takes place between Mitro and her mother: as Mitro enters the streets of Noor Mahal where her mother lived, they are both abuzz with excitement. The mother, ‘burly and tall as a man, kissed her daughter’s brow with full lips as if sucking candy’ (103). An intense libidinal relay links mother and daughter as they enter the mother’s home ‘chattering away happily’ (103). The relationship of mother and daughter was an intensification of the rivalry that comprised Mitro’s marital home with all her sisters-inlaw, for the sight of her daughter sitting with her husband sent a ‘venomous hiss’ through the mother’s body, for ‘Balo [the mother] had made hundreds of men dance to her tunes. Only the joy of possessing a husband had never been hers’ (104). Mitro is unperturbed by this rivalry, but the man, Sardarilal, ‘melted in shame’ seeing mother and daughter vying for him (104). The plan was to mildly drug the husband so that he may fall asleep, and Mitro may have a liaison. In a starkly imagined scene, Mitro is waiting to ascend the steps to the appointed lover. But in the darkness, the white odhni (stole) of her mother is visible, and then, a cry. The mother cannot bear the sudden freighted sense of a youth lost forever. Mitro seems momentarily empathetic with her mother’s sense of annihilation, and felt and ‘saw the gaping mouths of vacant doors looming in the dark’ (111). Yet, the next instant she is furious and calls her mother ‘a devotee of the dark arts! Are you now preparing to fry me and my husband in your empty vat?’ (112). The daughter only intensifies what the transgressive, openly sexual mother had begun in her time. Sobti had commented on the novel’s flaming, glittering voices and

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the special autonomy that Mitro commanded. On the back cover of the book, Sobti remarks: ‘Mitro was not a writer’s story. … I was amazed at the surprises Mitro gave me at every turn. … Mitro is her mother’s daughter who can voice her desires and get away with it. … She really impressed me.’ While Sobti would seem to be riding on Mitro’s voice, taking herself where Mitro led, a more delicate, gossamer crafting was required in Sunflowers of the Dark (henceforth Sunflowers). Sobti uses the same telegraphic sentences, but here, instead of the liveliness of a voice and personality, we have a skeletal, abashed self, a soft voice akin to that of the constant drift of snow in the mountainous landscape where parts of Sunflowers are set. Throughout the novel, time is distended, and it seems that everyone responds to the other only after a long time, as if the voice itself slows in the cold air. It is as if much of the action takes place in the hollow space carved out whenever anyone speaks. As light as voice is the sense of touch: ‘But Keshi [a male friend of the protagonist Ratika] wasn’t holding her, his touch was just a luminal presence on her arm’ (Sobti 2008, 9). The sentiment recurs at the end of the novel: ‘Diwakar kissed her closed eyes lightly, as if it weren’t a touch, just a desire to’ (94). Likewise, many substances (such as alcohol) expand time. In the last scene, Ratika says that she wishes to drink so slowly that the last drop will be drunk at the moment of sun-rise, when the sun itself will become a last, red, ascending drop. There are long descriptions of minute actions and hushed sounds inconceivable in Mitro: chairs being pulled toward a fireplace, of trays being set, of cabinets opened, of the click of glasses, of feet that do not thud as they are enwrapped in thick socks, of the names not called but whose shapes linger on tongues, of movements that are always kept quiet so that children may not wake up, of the muffled sounds of weeping. Voices seem to take place external to oneself: ‘she was outside this conversation, outside all doors’ (13). Like voices, laughter

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too has many adjectives—the child’s trill, the much married man’s guilty laugh, the laugh after ‘downing three doubles’, the ‘voice that sieved through instruments [that is, the phone] and touched her eyes’ (88–9). In the prevalent definition of depression, Ratika remarks that ‘it is not a question of desiring, but of [her not] being able to desire’ (18). Reema is a friend of and serves as foil to Ratika, as the former represents resilient wifely and motherly domesticity: ‘a well-kept kitchen is the pride of a home’ (18). Ratika is, however, not to be merely pathologized, her qualities of gentleness, stillness, silence, and vulnerability suffuse the movement of the narrative. She watches over the only one more vulnerable than her, Reema’s child Kumu. An ayah (domestic help) is the only mirror to Ratika’s childlessness, the word ‘barren’ is repeated through the novel (for example, 20, 21). In contrast to the formative, if difficult, mother–daughter bonds in Memory’s Daughter, Mitro, and Listen Girl!, the protagonist in Sunflowers is childless (and has no mother). Ratika does not have the insouciance of Mitro, the will-to-live of Pasho, or the accomplished grit of the mothers in those novels. Sometimes though, she does seem to be on her way toward the silent and inwardly ferocious despair of Balo, the mother of Mitro. In Sunflowers, there are few statements on motherhood. Instead, there is a comment on the mock-heroic desire to give birth not to daughters but to five or seven sons, which is a parody of the traditional Sanskrit blessing, ‘May you be the mother of a hundred sons’ (74–5). Childlessness stands in for an incipient ageing, this ageing is sometimes a maturing, sometimes a spasm of finitude that thrusts one away from everyday life. It is only in the last few pages that Ratika describes herself as a ‘lone working woman’. Very little of the novel is concerned with her working life and concerns itself instead with friendships, memories, loneliness, and isolation (105). Economic self-sufficiency seems to offer little respite from all these afflictions of the soul.

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The literary theorist Rita Felski, writing on the revitalization of the female realist bildung in post-war literature, insists that it is not a return to the old-fashioned form. In a chapter discussing writers such as Margaret Atwood, Alice Walker, Doris Lessing, and Fay Weldon, she notes ‘the reemergence and renewal of the Bildungsroman as a literary structure relevant to women’s current experiences in relation to the politics of feminism that calls into question avant-garde typologies of literary form which have simply dismissed realism as anachronistic’ (Felski 1989, 152). Sunflowers begins with the protagonist Ratika staying over at a friend’s house in Simla, a city on the south-western ranges of the Himalayas. Though Ratika’s age is not precisely mentioned, there is a pervasive anxiety with regard to ageing throughout the novel. This age is not only the biological age (the protagonist, at various points, dwells on the fact that her make-up sometimes takes hours) but equally the age of an exhausted soul, one to whom everything seems ‘a decades-old day. A decades-old evening. The same frosty winter’ (Sobti 2008, 7). Readers are often unable to discern how much time has passed as the evenings course through Ratika—one thinks one has barely shut one’s eyes, but hours have passed, rushing swift as minutes. Ratika’s perception of time is the time of the novel, for one is given few other external signs; the reader is not sure of the chronology, or causation, and there are leaps of years such that it is unclear if an incident is in the recent or distant past. An early, kind, potential male mate dies young. Many men criss-cross the narrative voice, often inflecting it, giving us a sense of how Ratika appears to the world outside. Despite her quietness, Ratika is revealed as fearless, not coy, but there is also a perceived tinge of bitterness and coldness, of stoniness. Except for a few recurring figures, the men are largely substitutable for one another—most of them bubble up and disappear fairly early and quickly. But it is not only the men who are substitutable. The last page has Ratika observing of her lover’s wife: ‘She used to say something like this, to

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herself about you, and to me about herself ’ (107). The second section titled Tunnels, appearing around 35 pages into the novel, slowly reveals the tumult of Ratika’s childhood and girlhood. It discloses the incident of abuse that shaped both her attitude and distinctiveness in the world. The home and schoolyard violence of Ritika’s girlhood (perhaps the ‘acting out’ of the abuse) is slowly distilled into the quiet that one begins to take for granted as the key to her adult persona. As a girl, she had been persecuted by her school friends for being a ‘bad girl’. Her isolation from her teasing, giggling schoolmates grows, as does the well of silence that encompasses her (38). The mood is often set not just through dialogue but through Ratika’s perception of herself: ‘a desolate return to her self. … Who is she? Ratti [the common diminutive of her name in the novel]: An endless road. And her own road’s dead end’ (8–9). In the first section (called The Bridge) one hears characterizations of a troubled, populated internal world: ‘everyone has two selves’, and ‘I feel as if it were my own post-mortem’ (30–1). Later, the narrative remarks that ‘she seemed to discard one persona and wear another, putting the first one on a hanger’ (65). This may have been whispered with a mordant eye on the Gita, a sacred Sanskrit text, which has a philosophy of rebirths, where dead souls re-enter the universe by picking up new bodies as new clothes. Whereas in the Gita the connotation is the triumphant immortality of the soul, here the reference is more to the many deaths we carry inside of us, the tired indifference to living. On the next page, Ratika feels looked at ‘as if at the negative of a familiar photograph’ (66). Here are a few more descriptions of a wearied self: ‘the dark snow-covered cave where secret life stirs, serpent-like … as many darned patches on her self as there were images in her memory … her own corpse looming before her’ (77–8). Like the voice, the face is a common metonym for a patchwork, ripped-open self: ‘Every door a face. Every face a body. And every body a room’ (81). The images of the shredding

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gaze continue: ‘you too have trained your lens on me and are clicking away mercilessly’; there is the image of the self as a reflection in the window pane that one passes (90). Sobti even writes of the face as a telephone dial that never seems to break through to the other voice. It is a selfhood that never quite manages to achieve itself, and where the integrity of the ‘I’ is not to be taken for granted. In Sunflowers, in the context of abuse, the split, dissociating, doubling self may be taken as entirely unsurprising, a desperate desire to cope and defend the ravelled self. Yet somehow, from deep within, there is also healing and affirmation. Mentorship, and many friendships, create a hammock of faith. In the last pages Ratika asks: ‘Do you know how much this silk has had to endure to become so fine, so soft?’ (100). In line with the dominant affect of the novel, there is the same reverence for silence, the same ‘silence of an aeon … for one lifelong moment. Like the earth holding her breath’ (98–9). Like Mitro, the voice negotiates claustrophobia to imagine notions of freedom—even if the affect of freedom is sometimes speech, and sometimes a gathering silence. This latter silence is not acquiescence, but rather a receptivity, an exposedness, a gestation. Mitro speaks, even if impulsively, while Ratika has a pall of silence, even if it is of a sharpening vulnerability. In Mitro’s case, she realises that her voice may not always transcend the walls and doors of her room, let alone the male quarters or the neighbourhood beyond. Even when the voice does seem to sail free, it retains the embodied quality of her defiant body, her hair unloosened, in strict contravention of houserules. In Sobti’s work, a peculiar power often emerges from this reciprocity of voice and body, of the insides and outsides of houses, bodies, and faces. There is an aptness to the speech and voice of Mitro versus the speech and voice of Ratika. For both women, the outside is not a world to be seen as an object (of beauty, or ownership). But even in the novels where the protagonist is a single working woman, the claustrophobia of interiors (houses, sexual and ageing bodies,

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mental health, and unlit office spaces) overspreads the world. The world is never a flat landscape that allows freewheeling movement, à la Srikanta. Even if the protagonist is alone and economically selfsufficient, her mind is teeming with her family’s and peers’ voices, of chastisements or blandishments. What she often wishes for is that pure, snowy silence that only the Himalayas can sometimes give. It is thus one of the great achievements of Sobti that she can write both intensive, heated, busy mélanges of interweaving dialogue (a small room full of competing sisters-in-law) and create great monuments of silence such as in Sunflowers. By removing the omniscient, controlling third-person descriptions, Sobti makes the novel emerge as a series of floating, unpinned voices. It is as if a blind person is walking through a landscape, only hearing voices, unable to place the speaker. By removing the signposts of location, the voice often speaks without a clear intent in mind. What of all the talk remains germane to the plot? Is the plot itself essentially this digressive, mixed voice? And then, other voices—equally un-locatable—respond to what has been said, and often to even the unsaid within the said. A host of suspicious relatives are always scheming, reading between the lines. Nothing is at face value or has a pure declarative force. There are weary voices, taunting voices, and provocative voices, as well as the voices of irreverence or wry wit. The large, stable social realist novel becomes, in Sobti’s hands, syncopated in Mitro’s pointed sarcasm or Ratika’s silent scream. Many Hearts, Many Reasons The literary challenge for Sobti was to see how far she could push such an ensemble of voices without losing the reader. Though most of her oeuvre consists of novelettes, she has attempted a few larger works. The most significant of these is Zindaginama (1979), but this

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section will discuss a smaller novel to ask the same question of how she manages to negotiate a complex storyline without losing her signature play of voice. In Dil-o-danish (The Heart Has Its Reasons), Sobti takes the reader on a linguistic and historical journey to the Delhi of the 1920s. The historical is of interest to Sobti not for its own sake but as a distanced social and cultural setting for narrative architectures of affect. The language in The Heart Has Its Reasons is that of reined-in passion. In this sense of its restraint, it is similar to Sunflowers. The basic situation in the novel invites melodrama: one is introduced at the beginning to a lawyer, Kripanarayan, who runs two separate households—one that of his wife and the other that of his mistress. These households are complicated by the fact that though Kripanarayan is an upper-caste Hindu, married to a casteappropriate woman (Kutumb), the mistress (Mehak) belongs to another social register—she is Muslim and, being of a tawaif (courtesan) family, suffers from much social censure and disapproval. Kripanarayan has two children from each of the women. Sobti has done enough research to make the narrative historically credible— the novel is full of details such as which shop was favoured for which dessert in the Old Delhi of the 1920s. The language captures the musicality of the Hindi–Urdu of the time. But the chief narrative investment in the novel is the ‘affect-track’ of the story-line, with its inevitable mélange of high passion—family and caste honour, and tears of betrayed children. There is the simmering of strong emotion, but there is also the genteel courteousness that is essential to a language with the rich heritage of Urdu. Conversations take place around the many elements that comprise that deeply civil culture—and for someone such as Mehak, poetic language is the very currency of her profession and pride. This language of the courtesan, in the Indian imagination, was in its essence the meretricious and rhetorical containment of pain and personal suffering (Vanita 2017).

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This does not mean that the narrative does not give us the means to see into Mehak’s world of suffering—or for that matter, into Kripanarayan’s or Kutumb’s world. But this avatar of Sobti (like in Sunflowers) has moved away from the open, defiant, and even crude speech of a Mitro where nothing is held back. In The Heart Has Its Reasons, there is a clear separation of different kinds of speech—there is Mehak’s powerful restraint and Kripanarayan’s anguished confusion on the one hand, while on the other there are indeed characters given to outbursts, reminiscent of Mitro. These outbursts chiefly emanate from Kutumb and other members of Kripanarayan’s family, such as Chunnu—Kripanarayan’s widowed sister. But the overall architecture of the novel is very much that of the even keel—though outbursts are evoked, the scene is quickly shifted, and one is back in an environment of spacious courtesy. Silence is preferred to open emotional rupture, and the quality of such estranged, remote, courteous silences may be part of the reason that the novel is set in an earlier time when Urdu was still the unquestioned language of high culture in north India. The demi-monde could access such a language: Mehak is introduced as one ‘who took everything in with a sweeping glance. With a small, quiet laughter, cool as the moist breeze outside’ (Sobti 2009, 10). The binarism (of status, as also personality) is set in place early by the less partisan Munshiji, assistant to Kripanarayan: ‘There’s that Charburzi Haveliwali [that is, Kutumb], always upset and angry. And here this begum [lady], all grace and charm’ (12). This sentiment is repeated by Kripanarayan early in the novel as a way of establishing difference. He uses the women as synecdoche for larger, incompatible ways of life and values: ‘these sights, sounds, and smells [of his beloved Chandni Chowk, the heart of Old Delhi] are unknown to Kutumb in her zenana [place of seclusion]. She doesn’t understand any of this and she goes on and on, like some stupid sparrow attacking itself in a mirror’ (13). Kripanarayan feels more at home in

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Mehak’s establishment, and the relationship is built as much on the love for a specific type of cultural and phenomenological landscape as on simple attraction. The 1920s were also the time of the eruption of consistent, largescale communal violence, with the loss of syncretic solidarity at a national level post the failure of the Khilafat movement (Pandey 2005). The paradox is that a place such as Old Delhi/Chandni Chowk is a sign of both a happy historical commingling and vicious inter-religious violence. Sobti has often returned to the theme of the incalculable loss of Partition. Violence was often at its worst in the old parts of the cities where the traditional Muslim elites resided. After Partition, the demography of Delhi was to utterly change. The loss is thus not only cultural but also romantic—what drives the novel is the salon-based Mehak-Kripanarayan attraction. The destruction of the romantic relationship stands for the destruction of that overall synthetic culture. Memory’s Daughter also had an interreligious love standing in for the larger unravelling of the social. It is not a coincidence that the chapter where Anwar Khan (Mehak’s later suitor) is introduced is also the chapter where religious culture and education is directly thematized: Mehak’s son Badruddin (called Badru) goes from a Muslim madrasa education to a government (that is, in this context, Hindu) school, and then to a Christian/missionary school, the last being the most modern and the most alienated from the native milieu. The description of the most sanctioned family regime—the upper-caste Hindu family of Kripanarayan, his parents, Kutumb, and his children—is familiar. It is not that different from Mitro’s world—there is the familiar scenario of many daughters-in-law vying for the prize of being the favourite. Sundry jewellery is at stake. In contrast, Mehak’s family is nuclear, if only by default. There is just her and her two children, Masooma and Badru, with the father Kripanarayan making his occasional guest appearance. In theory,

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Kripanarayan could have married her for polygamy, for Hindus was banned from it only in the 1950s, and it was not uncommon for the wealthy. Yet, among other things, Mehak is Muslim and hence beyond the pale of his caste. In typical Sobti fashion, the reader finds herself early in the novel in an unexpected, layered space—it is not the thrill of a man embarking on an affair. Rather, there is already an affect of exhaustion: Kripanarayan is most at home, not with either woman but with male friends and alcohol. He is already tired of his life and loves, and cannot fathom what new horrors the future promises. The reader is made aware that Kutumb has long considered Mehak a thorn in her skin. Kutumb is already plotting the next step, which is to ensure the future of her children as the true and complete inheritors of the family’s wealth and respectability. She is aware that Mehak’s son Badru is street-smart as well as diplomatic and charming, and so would definitely make a bid for Kripanarayan’s favour. These favours include an expensive foreign education and the inheritance of the legal client roster. Even if Mehak is more diffident, Badru has the air of a young man who knows what he wants and will not scruple much to get it. Badru is acculturated into the language of family gold from his earliest youth, somewhat to Mehak’s astonishment: he has been carefully observing what Kutumb’s family wears (58). When Mehak scornfully remarks that the other house runs their ‘family like a business’, Badru does not respond, for all indications are that he has similar ideas (59). Growing up in a decrepit house and seeing his step-siblings live in ample comfort, Badru is determined to not repeat the mistake of either parent. The central voice of the novel is that of Mehak. In her alone is action complex and emerging from a place of introspection and careful valuation. By now it should be clear that one of Sobti’s main methods of layering characters is to give them mothers—mothers with whom they have several unresolved disputes, such that it

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matters little if they are alive or dead. What gives Mehak interiority is this relationship of pathos with her mother. Her mother too was a courtesan, whom Kripanarayan had helped through a sensational murder case whereby she had allegedly killed her lover. At one point, Mehak tells Kripanarayan: ‘Ammi [mother] kept running all her life. God knows where all she went, but nobody was rich enough to give her even a little respite. Not one moment of happiness could she count as her own’ (135). Mehak goes on to tell him that she understands that, in the complex web of personal and professional obligations that Kripanarayan owes to mother and daughter, it had become increasingly unclear what the boundaries of expectation and love were: ‘You mean a lot to me, but the truth is that Ammi never presented you with any husbandly duties that obliges me to accept everything that comes from you’ (136). Kripanarayan does not hide the fascination he had with the mother: ‘I couldn’t sleep the whole night. That beautiful face … charged with murder!’ (138). Mehak seems to have lived her life trying to repress the anger that her mother had also felt—the rage against their social status and position, the gap between their skills, and the life of insecurity they were forced to lead. Like many other Sobti heroines, the distinctions between mother and daughter are not clear-cut: Mehak is both the compensatory opposite and sometimes continuous and interchangeable with her mother: ‘It is as if someone has replaced my face with Ammi’s and it is she who is staring at me in the mirror. … Sometimes, when I stand in wait for you, elbows propped on the parapet on the roof, I feel it’s not me but Ammi standing there’ (138). The triangle of the mother, the daughter, and the lover also has the old, familiar causes, such as jewellery (both for itself and the independence, sanity, and freedom it can ensure): ‘Sometimes, she [the mother] whispers words of caution into my ears—Bano [Mehak], don’t let go of your rights! Nawab sahib [the mother’s patron] swindled her first of her jewellery and then of her

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sanity’ (138). The stakes of jewellery (as the signifier of independence for a woman) have never been higher. Mehak seems different from her mother in that she does not want the ugly public messiness of her mother’s tears and threats of violence. For Mehak, it is extremely important that there be ‘decorum’ in her dealings with Kripanarayan, even if that decorum comes at the cost of much hurt and repression (148). Further, Naseem Bano was a distant mother who uttered many platitudes to her child. Whenever the daughter came to her, she was hastily dismissed, sometimes with beatings. Sometimes, she was asked to go on with her music practice, for music—like courteous speech—was again the courtesan’s currency and passport out of poverty and shame. In contrast, Mehak strives to be a better mother to her children. She does not wish them to continue her profession—her son was to be a respectable lawyer and her daughter was to marry into a respectable family. Although at great personal and emotional cost, she does manage to achieve these aims by the end of the novel. A new lover, Anwar Khan, finally allows Mehak the gift of rage, thus linking her in secret sympathy to her mother. In the latter part of the novel, Mehak goes on a ‘tirade’ against Kripanarayan, and he admits that this was the ‘first time he had seen Mehak like this’ (144). It is rather late in the day for their love. It coincides with Kutumb’s attempted suicide, and it seems for Kripanarayan that his relationships with both the women are simultaneously breaking down. But Mehak does not allow Kutumb’s attempted suicide to take away from her moment of pure, naked rage. It is the final separation of the novel. There is pervasive sadness, a return of the full sorrow of the mother that Mehak seems to have carried in the very nervous system of her body: ‘from a cast off skin of long ago, Naseem Bano emerged. Mehak was pensive and quiet. Shutters came down on those lustrous eyes … it is not time to sleep / under the shadow of some wall / covering the face with some sheet.

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It takes no time to start, and still lesser for it to finish’ (145; italics in original). The novel has an astute sense of the inter-corporeal dynamics of the protagonists. Attraction between couples may be ever mysterious, but a growing self-consciousness plays with one’s sense of their own and their lover’s body, just as it plays with a sense of the mother’s body within one. Mehak often wonders what attracted her to Kripanarayan in the first place and thus embarks on this journey of uncertainty and self-loathing. She recognized that Kripanarayan was fast losing his voice, speed, and sense of authority even when she had first met him. Sensing Mehak’s growing distaste, he further loses selfconfidence; the end of their love is so total that it is hard for either of them to reconstruct what that love might ever have been. Only odds and bits of memories remain, say a particular way of his wearing a black sherwani (163). But the heart has grown cold. Unsurprisingly, this re-ignites in Mehak a more urgent interest in what Kripanarayan could offer by way of money—something that her earlier love had suppressed (168). Towards the end of the novel, money begins to irretrievably complicate their former easy banter. There is an added strain: earlier, there was only the problem of being the second woman, but now, with the loss of love, there comes to light a hitherto suppressed sea of pettiness, fatigue, and greed. In this situation, a final resolution to the novel feels rather implausible. Kripanarayan has a sister, Chhunna, whose husband’s family has a son who is willing to marry Masooma if Kripanarayan officially adopts her and Masooma disclaims all relations to Mehak. It is unclear why Chhunna’s family would want a marriage alliance with a woman of less than respectable standing. Perhaps Sobti wanted to end the novel with a picture of Mehak’s final isolation from everyone, including her children. This last conceit is the most cutting, as Mehak had long tried to treat her children better than her mother had treated her. The price of their freedom and respectability is their repudiation of her.

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This inter-generational solution to the problem of the courtesan/ second woman is protracted. The children turn out to be eminently practical, being forced to come to terms with their father’s two houses. Badru and Masooma are precocious adults and talk with much familiarity of the details of property, jewellery, money, education, and marriage. The narrative highlights the deep bonding and mirroring of Badru and Kripanarayan (including their complicit guilt in isolating Mehak). But nothing quite prepares the reader for the brutal abandonment of Mehak by Masooma, though there is the understandably strong temptation of respectability for Masooma if she marries outside the courtesan-ambit. There is an equally strong motive of self-interest for Badru to disown Mehek— with respect to his father’s wealth, respectability, and the promise of education and a palatial home. How did it all come to this? Mehak was unwilling to let Kripanarayan off lightly—she insists on her mother’s jewellery being returned. Kripanarayan is taken aback by Mehak’s new-found voice. Yet, Mehak is clear in what she wants—she is unforgiving of Kripanarayan but is willing to forgive her son’s ambitions even when they come at great cost to her. She behaves in the same self-assured, controlled way when her son panics that she may disrupt the sister’s carefully planned marriage (189). In the last scenes, she is isolated but resplendent, and there is a sense of a chrysalis of a new womanhood: ‘before today I was not even a woman. … The shoes were mine, but I had given away my feet’ (192). There is almost a sense of triumph in the fact that Kripanarayan begins to increasingly fade away in the narrative, even as she is on the verge of a new life. She does finally give away her mother’s jewellery—jewellery that functioned as the fetishist centre of the many strands of the novel. In the end, Kripanarayan achieves a patriarch’s death, surrounded by all his family in a large, ancient house; and though this is its own kind of fulfilment and even justice, it is also the culmination of the corrosion that had

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begun ever since he lost Mehak’s love. The last ghost-voice of the novel is him reading from the ‘red register’, a sort of will. What is poignant about that deathbed voice is his longing for times long past, of ‘mushairas [poetry gatherings] in Mission College’, and above all, ‘strolling down to the Ghantaghar [city-bell] on warm winter afternoons, sloping off to Chandni Chowk on cool summer evenings to meet Bano [Mehak], watching the dark summer clouds sway ominously over Jama Masjid in the rains—colourful wonderful sights strung together in one string. Dilli’ (220). Words redeem and pledge memories, even after death, in an endless and unrelenting cycle. Is there a vantage point outside the conventional melodramatic triangle of the husband/wife/second woman? One of the strengths of the novel is that this position too is fleshed out: this voice is that of Kripanarayan’s sister, Chhunna. Her position as a widow gives her unexpected freedom as it is outside the tight dyadic sets of husband-wife, husband-lover, wife-mistress. What function does Chhunna serve, for her presence risks undermining the stringent narrative economy of the triangle? The social censure against widows, who then paradoxically use their alleged powerlessness in unforeseeable ways is an old trope in the Indian novel—it was directly thematized in as early as Tagore’s Chokher Bali (1905), and Tagore stayed with the theme even in Home and the World (1916). The widow, having no attachment, and often still a young woman, was a figure that caused much disquiet, especially to other young wives. The widow had to work within a narrow niche, there was always the risk of banishment to Varanasi if she was too explicitly powerful. There was also the common saying that ‘a widow’s treasure is for common pleasure’—a misogynist adage quoted in the novel (98). In The Heart Has Its Reasons, Chhunna bravely faces this sword of judgment hanging over her—she even manages to keep the largest room in the house (to Kutumb’s annoyance) and also

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uses the wedge between Kripanarayan and Kutumb to insert herself into their relationship. She advises both husband and wife to her advantage, manipulating an unhappy family situation to ends that benefit her. Chhunna is distinctive in the history of the Indian novel in being able to articulate rage so openly—in behaviour and words. The power of this rage is achieved through the use of the firstperson, even though she rarely verbalizes her feelings in front of other family members. Being vulnerable to maximal familial control, she rebels as much as she can—if she must wear a white sari, it will at least have a coloured border (53). She does not accept the moral and ritual superiority of the married woman and fights for her self-interest. In this, she is foil to both Mehak (though she is in an equally luckless position, Chhunna is more vocal and agential) and Kutumb (Chhunna’s rage is articulated more coherently and with more self-awareness and control). Kutumb is further cursed with scheming brothers whose only function in the narrative is to continually goad her regarding jewels and to warn her against Badru. The brothers’ goading is significant: conventional wisdom would have Kutumb do nothing, or—as Kripanarayan’s mother advises—do more ‘sewing or knitting or satsang [prayers]’ so that she may gracefully allow the husband his male pleasures (83). Equally conventionally, the younger generation of women only indicate that Kutumb should use more and better makeup and wait for her husband to tire of Mehak; failing which, she should consult a holy man (75). Chhunna is no support within the family for Kutumb. She is happy to point out that Kripanarayan was beholden to Mehak’s mother for his current financial status. It had been the contact with Naseem Bano that facilitated Kripanarayan’s rise in the first place. Chhunna also has the will to use her piety for worldly ends: she wants and gets a pure, finely crafted silver idol, thus literalizing the fetish-trope of jewellery. Kutumb tartly remarks to Kripanarayan:

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You can’t make Jiji [Chhunna] take on all these pujas and fasts. She loves music and cards too much. … She may be a widow, but look at the interest in saris and all, look how exuberant she is! But then she’s your darling pampered sister … send Chhunna bibi to some ashram. Otherwise we will become a laughing stock. (78)

There is also an insinuation of a liaison between Chhunna and Kripanarayan’s cousin’s brother-in-law (79). Chhunna refuses to set store by the inauspiciousness that is supposed to accrue by a widow’s mere presence—that she be either ‘family clown, or nasty portent’ (85). She is aware how coveted are the rooms she occupies in the house and how much the family would like to get rid of her for good and have her stay on in her in-laws’ house (90). Of course, she is hardly welcome in her husband’s house either: to be loyal to the dead, one cannot be wearing tight blouses, high heels, or the fashionable saris that Chhunna wore in occasional defiance (92). Such a strong societal gaze made it difficult for Chhunna to own up to her genuine sorrows—the lack of a child (emotionally, but there is also the added fact that a male child would have allowed her a share of the property). Besides, there is also the genuine sorrow of the death of a husband who had loved her beyond all petty family envy. Sobti makes sure to represent both the spaces the widow could inhabit, if only uneasily—the natal space, and the space of the husband’s house. By returning to her natal family after her husband’s death, Chhunna had acted wisely, even though she has to constantly negotiate the thicket of reputation (real and perceived) within the household and the neighbourhood. It is thus the voice of Chhunna that subverts and deflates the traditional melodramatic triangle and rounds out the novel. The richness of Sobti’s oeuvre with regard to voice and affect is her full appreciation of how elusive and slippery the idea of voice actually is. The voice does not simply represent thought or action, and indeed the most effective use of voice is in the disjunct between

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what is said and how it is said, and by whom. Many of the women characters, on the one hand, play on this indeterminacy of the social and avowed powerlessness of their putative gender position and, on the other hand, use their voice (that is, their wit and patient cunning) to actively disrupt that very structure of power.

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There is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future, by a past which is not reducible to a former present, by a future which does not consist of a present to come. Simple succession affects the presents which pass, but each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on. —Deleuze (2005, 36) A free self is a human self, and we are, as Aristotle long ago insisted, creatures of the polis, social beings. We are social in many ways and for many reasons: because we desire company, because we depend on one another for survival, because so much that we care about is collectively created. —Appiah (2001, 326) Vulnerability, exposure to outrage, wounding, passivity more passive than all patience, passivity to the accusative form, trauma of accusation suffered by a hostage to the point of persecution, implicating the identity of the hostage who substitutes himself for

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all others: all this is the self, a defecting or defeat of the ego’s identity. And this, pushed to the limit, is sensibility, sensibility as the subjectivity of the subject. —Levinas (1991, 15)

The title of this book must not be misunderstood: one is not trying to make an argument for an essentialist or substantialist notion of the self—a self that can apprehend the past as a garland of events, each event readily interpretable as having significance or moral truth. Rather, the picture is one of the moral speculations of a tentative and elusive subject. The decisive moment is often an ethical stress-point that needs to be managed: subjectivity emerges and dissolves as these ensembles of individuating moments. That moment of management reveals something of the nature of both the self and the socio-moral order. The ethical stress is not just a negativity but often a literary tool to parse open deeper insights into and realizations of both the world and the self. This realization cannot be snatched too quickly: one must have the patience to follow the voices and movements, the ascents and glides, the silences, and the reticences and withdrawals of affect. The novels discussed in the previous chapters capture and demonstrate, to various extents, the negotiations of these stressors. As the philosopher Paul Ricoeur commented: ‘What must be interpreted in a text is a proposed world which I could inhabit and wherein I project my ownmost possibilities’ (1991, 86). Such imagined inhabitations of worlds are central to language and thought, and reside in varying degrees in every type of discourse, be it fictional or not—for the modes and insights involved occur at a register before the split into the different genres of fiction, novels, history, memoir, and so on happens. This book would wish to conclude with a brief excursus into a genre less common in literary criticism: the realm of juridical discourse. Of the many linkages between law and literature in India, perhaps

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the most familiar one is that of the vicissitudes of free speech— a category historically most associated with the provocations of literature (Liang 2016). The politics of censorship has been one of the prime sites of this conversation. The fictional is often seen—or at times seems to be seen—as real/historical, as was the case of the recent controversy surrounding the film Padmaavat (2018), or that of the writer Perumal Murugan with regard to his novel One Part Woman (2015). The latter case will be discussed in some detail so that many of the dimensions of the novel’s internal and external worlds can be tied together—issues of representation of self and community, sexuality and memory, history and practice. The literary historian Gajarawala has demonstrated that it is not at all predictable which novel gets picked for censure and when—Premchand’s Rangbhumi (The Arena of Life, originally published in 1924) got publicly burned in 2004, when far more openly provocative novels suffered no such fate (Gajarawala 2012). Conflicts with law make up a crucial dimension of literary texts. But this section is not so much making a case for expansive or restrictive notions of free speech as asking one to step back to analyse the totality of the High Court judgment regarding Perumal Murugan in July 2016 through all the different types of evidence and scenarios presented. This would give us a fuller picture of the mixture of issues at stake. The initial point of interest—something that is both inside and outside the High Court judgment proper—is Murugan’s famous ‘suicide note’ on Facebook. The author had composed this in response to being hounded by many people who said he had represented their community and religion as promiscuous. Murugan was already a well-known writer by the time of the controversy, one who had built his reputation over two decades with a versatile oeuvre whose formal inventiveness concentrated on themes of rural life, including poverty, sexuality, and caste-violence. It was only with the translation of One Part Woman that a national storm erupted. The novel, set in an indeterminate

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historical time, is plotted thus: a young rural couple wants a child and, on being unable to conceive, the woman (with the husband’s agreement) takes recourse to an ancient ritual where on a particular, auspicious night and in the vicinity of a temple, she was allowed intercourse with a stranger. After the book’s translation into English was published five years later, there were objections by the community which operated the temple where this ritual was allegedly sanctioned and performed. As Murugan was speaking of the town, community, and temple where he himself resided, he began to be threatened in his home. In response to a growing climate of hostility, and on finding the state administration indifferent to the threats directed against him, Murugan took to Facebook and declared that he, as writer, was dead, and that since he was no god, he would never be resurrected. Readers were asked to burn their copies of his books, and he volunteered to refund them. At one point, he offered to buy back past novels of his. This was not only suicide but an annihilation of his entire literary past, as if he had never existed as a writer. He said he was no longer author or creator, but only a teacher (he was a lecturer by profession). It ends with a plea for privacy and safety for himself and his family. Doubtlessly, there are many dimensions to be explored, including the significance of the death/suicide of an author in an age of social media. However, one strand that this conclusion wants to investigate is this notion of the public suicide of writing. Even this book discusses (for example, in the works of Urmila Pawar, Agyeya, and Habib) the implicit idea of writing as healing, as correcting, as a measure addressing and moderating the inequalities and deceptions of the world. Writing is never just a personal representation but a moral act that transmutes the evil of the world, even if infinitesimally. This is not an uncommon idea: Ann Cvetkovich has written of the public as a site for the ‘depathologization of negative feelings such as shame, failure, melancholy and depression, and the resulting rethinking of

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categories such as utopia, hope and happiness as entwined with and even enhanced by forms of negative feeling’ (2012, 5). In Murugan’s case, this ethic seems to have been decisively defeated. Murugan chose public suicide as a way of communicating with his many enemies—impersonal enemies he had not consciously made and whom he could not know. Who can fathom the motivations of the aggressive, large crowds that gathered outside his house, threatening him and his family? A large number of those outraged at the book were only galvanized after the English translation appeared; and many who gathered outside his house were perhaps acquaintances he would have known in his small town. He had been born in the area and had lived there all his life, all of his work too was set in that single district of the state of Tamil Nadu. It would be impossible to know why exactly any one of those people gathered outside was now so suddenly offended? Murugan has written of his surprise, anger, and hurt of those days: this enforced withdrawal from the world was very different from the private creative world that a novelist requires for his craft (Murugan 2017). A new kind of interiority was born: a shocked negotiation of an inner world of pain and hurt with an outer world of contingent legal and police protection, all of which was itself nested in a broader cultural and juridical uncertainty about the kind of polity India was and aspired to become. It is a different matter that the issue ended on a happier note, and the High Court judge who ruled in his favour personally pleaded with Murugan to keep on writing. In an Indian ‘judocracy’, one can die and be resurrected, be wounded and healed in a direct continuum with the state of the polity (Ranjan 2012). In that suspended time between his Facebook note and the judgment that freed him, Murugan shifted genre and exclusively wrote poetry—the collection was translated as the Songs of a Coward (2017). He takes up the derided value of cowardice and reclaims it as a quiet, unobtrusive affirmation of the values of peace, non-violence, and tolerance. But

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notwithstanding happy endings, and using the text of the judgment, the following section would like to return to that earlier picture of despair, horror, and the palpable public lack of security that Murugan experienced. The judgment could easily have gone either way: there is a frightening durability about that image of the massing of a heterogeneous group of people against a writer’s freedom of imagination. Murugan was lucky that a judge known for progressive judgments had actively asked for the case; the judge had earlier favoured the painter M. F. Hussain in a similar case regarding free speech. But let us proceed to the text of the judgment. Law and Narrative Even a dry legal document of the judgment demands some type of narrativization. From Murugan’s perspective, his story begins with an abrupt, rising tide of rumours in his home-town of Thiruchengodu. He starts hearing of circulating photocopies of his novel, with parts underlined. Often, the photocopies contain only eight or so selected pages of a 200-page novel. Events begin to move swiftly and mysteriously. There is soon tension in the entire town. The author senses, over a few weeks, a rising sense of vulnerability and fear for himself and his family. Continuous with the nature of a stressed Indian polity, Murugan finds that far from being able to go to the police for help, a police complaint has been lodged against him! Photographs are circulated of the burning of his novel and of his photograph being beaten and kicked. There are calls for him to be dismissed from government service, there is a string of vitriol on WhatsApp, and even a bandh (strike) is called. This is despite the author’s readiness to make an apology, withdraw all copies of the novel, and his insistence that the novel is pure fiction and not intended to represent, leave alone offend, any community. Finally, a ‘peace meeting’ is called at the District Revenue Officer’s chamber.

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The author agrees to go there and, in fear, brings with him a senior advocate. In that meeting, he issues a statement expressing ‘sincere regret’, while the officer insists it to be an ‘unconditional apology’ and tells the advocate (who is from another town) that the scruples of the wording of the statement matter less than the fact that the police will otherwise be burdened with protecting the author. There is a pervasive air of hate and aggression. The text of the judgment lists a heap of adjectives, bringing alive the atmosphere of those days—the novel is considered blasphemous, outrageous, defamatory, offensive, morally unacceptable, dubious, perverted, false, vicious, orgiastic, free-for-all sex festival, vituperative, filthy, lascivious, and prurient. Many of these terms are repeated, and it may be noted that some of these adjectives have a legal character (for example, defamation, lascivious, obscene, and so on have punitive and financial consequence, if held to be true). The structure of the judgment-text is that of petitioners (that is, Murugan) versus respondents (that is, the accusers as well as the government officers that failed to provide protection). Let us stay with Murugan’s description of events before proceeding to the accusers’ description. From Murugan’s side, there was an escalating sense of apprehension spread over weeks regarding personal and family security. Ready to apologize, he signed the peace statement. He experienced growing tension at the sight of the accusers who seemed indifferent to the fact that he was in a governmental space, often a police station, and that he and his wife and children were manifestly experiencing great mental anguish. He had been unable to return to his house; he felt both fear as well as shame in having signed an apology that he did not feel he ought to have signed. Moreover, he was now also deeply apprehensive regarding the unknown prospects of both his literary career and his profession as a college lecturer. This was his state of mind when he wrote his obituary on Facebook.

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In contrast to the above, there is the picture painted by the accusers. Before the accusers could paint a picture of Murugan, the court insisted that they establish a picture of themselves as a group with legitimate authority. It thus remained to be proven that they were a group with legitimate authority, who were then legitimately outraged by the actions of Murugan. Individual outrage is not enough to stand against the constitutional value of free speech, but if it can be proven that an entire community is outraged, there is a case. In this instance, however, as it turned out, there were many (and overlapping) communities that were supposedly outraged: Indian, Hindu, Tamil, Gounder, if one lists them in the descending order of size. This seemingly self-organizing, spontaneous grouping was the first nub of the problem. What was the legal animation of these entities? Part of the judgment was to ensure, according to precedent judgments, if it was tenable that an aggrieved party could be this ‘indeterminate class of persons’. How could any subsection of the group claim to speak for the group as a whole if there was no mechanism that justified that representation (the representatives here were not formally elected in any way, but simply spoke as self-appointed ‘leadership’)? The associations of the accusers were voluntary and not officially representative of the community (that is, they were not representative in the sense of members of the legislative council, or members of parliament), hence they would remain under the category of an ‘indeterminate class’. Most of the accusers were faceless to Murugan till they showed up in court: representatives of different, and unexpected, organizations had signed on, such as the Lorry Drivers’ Association. If we leave aside the question of their legitimacy to be representative of whom they claimed to represent and pay attention to the content of their argument, we are told that the following were insulted: (a) religious beliefs, (b) ideas of history, and (c) women (this was even as there were very few women in the agitation or at court). Much

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of the perceived insult was in the ascription of the unusual sexual practice to the community, when there were no written sources explicitly affirming the practice. Murugan conceded that there were no unambiguous written sources on this practice but pointed to the fact that this belief was widespread in the oral traditions of the area. To the accusers, there was a clear hierarchy between the written sources of tradition vis-à-vis the oral sources. Murugan also reminded them that he had agreed to change in later editions the names of the communities, towns, deities, and so on, even though his fame as a literary craftsman had been based on his minutely observed rural realism and his facility with different registers of the Tamil of the area. But the accusers said the damage had been done when Murugan claimed to have ‘done research and studied history’ for writing the novel. Was the book history or fiction, and what was the meaning of historically researched fiction? The accusers insisted that it could not be both. If it was fiction, why were the real names of temples, deities, towns, and castes used, with ‘false’ practices mixed in? Can only history offend, or can the avowedly fictional also defame? What is the legal liability of all these terms—novelized history, folklorebased fiction, research-based fiction, fictionalized history, fictionalized eroticism claiming to be based on specific community practices? Does the tone of, say, objective ethnographic neutrality versus that of voyeurism and exoticism matter? Further, outrage itself has to be proven as based on Murugan having made a false and outlandish claim: for example, if one was offended as a Hindu rather than as a Gounder, Murugan could argue that related practices, such as niyoga (where a widowed woman was married to the brother of the dead husband), were certainly present in the Hindu traditions; the story in One Part Woman is arguably not that different. However, the heterogeneous accusers have their own contradictions: sometimes the caste is aggrieved as a subset of Hinduism, sometimes it is aggrieved on its own unique terms, contra mainstream Hinduism.

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Going beyond the text of the judgment: it is insufficient for a reader to claim that much of the theoretical labour of academic writing in both history and literature goes against such strong binaries as that of historical reality versus novelistic fiction. In legal terms, much still hung on the nature of the real (especially in the negative sense of offence) versus the licences afforded to individual fiction writers. The accusers did not agree to settle even after Murugan offered to change names, and the reality of his living in Thiruchengodu exposed him to many potential threats. After the excitement of the court and media appearances, the dangers to his personal and professional life would easily return. After being a momentary global celebrity (where many international writers took his side), he would soon enough have to return to the realities of a small temple town in the Tamil hinterland. Indeed, the very fact that he was internationally famous cut both ways—while it got him widespread support, the accusers said he had shamed the community at a global level. Murugan (who belongs to an agriculturally powerful but non-upper-caste and non-Dalit background) was embroiled on both sides of the caste conflict— upper castes resented the representation of the temple deity, while the Scheduled Castes/Dalits claimed to be hurt because the novel indicates that it is mostly boys from these disadvantaged castes that come to the temple on that day and impregnate the woman-protagonist. Murugan and his associates based their case on the intrinsic and simultaneous merit of both free speech and literary quality. To be literary was to not be salacious; to these defendants, what was to be discussed was not the question of community representation and historical ritual but the inner dynamic of the novelistic treatment of an unhappy, childless couple. The location in Tamil Nadu or Hinduism is less significant than the overall affect achieved—pity and tenderness for the couple and their constrained universe of choices. The judges agreed with the defendants’ simultaneous assessment of free speech/literary affect. They conceded that it is this appropriate affect

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that is the mark of literariness, and hence the defendants were rewarded with the prize of free speech. Some legal commentators, such as Gautam Bhatia, have criticized this insistence on literary quality, calling it irrelevant or subjective, though they have on the whole hailed the judgment’s many progressive strands (Bhatia 2016b). What is it about Murugan’s case—not so much the judgment or outcome, but the potent gestures of authorial suicide and resurrection—that seems to connect so many vantages of contemporary moral and literary action? It is perhaps apt to end on this note of good fortune: Murugan did announce that he would write again, saying that many of his friends from around the world had pleaded with him to continue writing, and that the judge had promised to protect his resurrection and return to social health and wholeness. All the texts discussed in this book bring up these abyssal questions of authentic response and responsibility to varying kinds of affliction and hurt (humiliation, abandonment, mistrust, poverty, unfreedom, rage, shame, and so on). Beyond, or before, any hasty healing of trauma, there is the interstitial space where the shoreline of the wound breaches the notions of inner and outer, individuation and sociality, self and cosmos, the other and the state. This is the world of Ambedkar’s invocation of the Greek myth: the nude child held in the fire, seeking to be actively divinized. If the literary exists as a moral or metaphysical signpost, it is in that unclosed space of the wounded, crying utterance that—despite all failed aspirations to divinity—insists on questioning, founding, and inventing genres and multiplying epiphanies.

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Index

Aaydan (Weave of Life) xxxix, 28, 49, 60 abandonment 104, 153 abuse 39, 120, 128–9 Adivasi Will Not Dance, The xxi adulthood 54, 63, 75, 123 Agyeya xxii, xxvii, xxxvii, xxxix, 56, 59, 61–4, 66, 70, 72, 75–6, 80, 113, 146 Ajitha 115 Ali, Agha Shahid 1 Ambedkar, B. R. xiii, xiv–xx, xxv, xxxi, xxxiii, xxxviii, 26, 50, 52, 55, 58, 153 memoirs 30 anger xxv, xxxii, xl, xlii, 11, 35, 43, 50, 62, 72, 135, 147 Anjaria, Ulka xxxvi anti-reservation atmosphere 38

Appiah, Kwame 143 Assam xx Bajpai, Rochana xvii Bama xxiv, 26, 47, 55 memoir of xxiv Baxi, Upendra xix Bergson, Henri 51, 108 Bhagavad Gita 13 Bhatia, Gautam 153 Bhattacharya, Krishnachandra xli, xlii, 88 bildung xxxix–xl, 27–8, 31, 51, 57, 60, 66, 73, 88, 105, 127 bilingualism 115 binarism 24, 132 Brueck, Laura xxxvi Butalia, Urvashi 117

166

Index

capital punishment 2, 4–6, 19 caste xv–xvi, xix, 30–2, 34, 40, 46–7, 49, 68, 73–4, 96, 107, 134, 151 prejudice 28, 37, 40 censorship laws 19 Chattopadhyay, Saratchandra xxxvii, xl, 88–90, 93, 100, 102, 109 Chitre, Dilip 57 Chughtai, Ismat xxxvii, xl, 56, 58–9, 61, 63–4, 66–8, 72, 79–80, 84 citizenship xxii consciousness xxxiii, 31, 74 Constitution xvi–xviii, xx–xxi, xxxiii conversion xx Crooked Line, The xl, 56, 58–60, 63, 65, 79–81, 83–4, 86 Shaman in 58–9, 63, 65–9, 71–3, 75, 79–81, 84–6 Cvetkovich, Ann 146 Dabashi, Hamid xxxix Dalit activists 55 anger xxv Buddhism 30, 55 masculinity 44 memoirs xv narratives xxxiv student 37 studies xxxvi subjectivation 28

Dalmia, Vasudha 80, 116 death xxv, 5, 11–12, 16–17, 22, 34–8, 44–6, 52–3, 64, 70, 77, 81–3, 85, 103, 105, 111–14 Deleuze, Gilles xxix, 17, 88, 116, 143 detachment xv, xxix, 13, 30, 32, 106–7 Devdas 89, 100 Dhananjoy (Bengali film) 4 Dhasal, Namdeo 44 dramatization 19 emotions xvi, xxxv, 4, 36, 45, 62, 112–13 entertainment 10, 19 eroticism 69, 104, 151 fallen, standing: my life as a schizophrenist xxx, xxxiii Felski, Rita 45, 127 female desire 21 self-consolidation 28 Foucault, Michel xxx, xxxii-xxxiii, xxxviii, 23, 82 free self 143 free speech 145, 148, 150, 152–3 Fundamental Rights xviii, xx Gajarawala, Toral xxxvi, 4, 145 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 27, 28, 33, 88–9 Gandhi, Leela xxxvi Gandhi, M. K. xxii, xxvi

Index

Garden, The 109–14 Aditya in 110–11, 113 Neerja in 109–14 Gopal, Priyamvada 61, 86 Gopalakrishnan, Adoor 6, 7 grief and loss 38, 98 Grossman, Vasily 1 Guru, Gopal xvii, xxxvi, 47 Habib, Anjum xxi–xxxi, xxxiii–xxxv, xxxviii, 75, 146 hanging 21 as religious rite 6 hangman 2, 5–8, 11–13, 15, 17 doctor vs 13 Hangwoman xxxviii–xxxix, 2–4, 7–8, 10–11, 14, 16–17, 19, 24, 121 Chetna in xxxix, 3–4, 7–26 as poverty-stricken 8 Sanjeev Kumar in 11, 14, 17, 20–3, 25 Heart Has Its Reasons, The xl, 120, 132 Hindi xxvii, 76, 116, 131 Hirsch, Marianne 83 horror xxiv, 3, 5, 13, 30–2, 56, 62, 74, 96, 112, 148 human rights xvii humiliation xiv–xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxv, xxxvi, xxxix, xli, 27, 42, 45, 60, 153 types of xx–xxi humour xiv, xl, 13, 51, 57, 59, 116

167

Hunt, Sarah Beth xxxvi Husain, Sahba xxv, xxviii, xxxiv individuality xviii, xxv, 1, 54 injustice xv–xviii, xxxii, xxxvi–xxxviii, 1–2, 14, 50, 99, 114 interiority xiii, 17, 20, 72, 87, 111, 147 inter-subjectivity 87 Jaaware, Aniket xxxvi Jainendra 63 Jha, Shefali xvii Joseph, Joshy 5–7 documentary 22 (See also Hangwoman) justice xvi, xviii, xxiv–xxv, 1–3, 7, 13, 16–17, 26, 45, 138 Kamble, Baby 47, 55 Kandasamy, Meena xxxv Kashmir xxii Kashmiri xxvii–xxviii Keshavamurthy, Kiran xxxvi Komti 39 Kumar, Udaya xxxvi, 31, 89, 101 Levinas, Emmanuel xiii, xli, 1, 15, 16, 29, 31–2, 36, 45, 72, 77–8, 87, 91, 98, 144 on separation xxxi Liang, Lawrence 145 Listen Girl! xl, 117–18, 122–4, 126 literature xiii, 145

168

Index

majoritarianism xix masculine identity 101 media systems 2, 3, 6–9, 11, 15, 16 Meera, K. R. xxxvii–xxxviii, xli, 3–4, 6–7, 9, 10, 25 melodrama 4, 18, 85, 131 Menon, Dilip 74 Memory’s Daughter xl, 116, 121 mother–daughter bonds in 126 Pashto in 116–17, 121 Ranjit Singh in 116 use of voice in 117 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 62 minor xx minorities xvii–xx Ambedkar on xix ‘protection’ of xx Mishra, Vidya Niwas 62 Moretti, Franco 73–4 mother tongue xviii–xix multilingualism 115 Munshi, Kanaiyalal xx Murugan, Perumal xli, 145–53 accusers to 150 on Facebook 145, 146, 150 on Whatsapp 148 ‘suicide note’ of 145 threats and 152 Nagaraj, D. R. xxxvi Naipaul, V. S. 71 Nandy, Ashis xix

Narrative gravity of negative affect 7–15 masculinist wanderlust 101–9 third-person 59 narrativization 56, 148 nationalism xx Nath, Arjun xxxv Nehru, Jawaharlal xxii, xxvi nomadicism xlii, 107 (See also Komti) North-East Frontier Tribal Areas xx, xxii Otherwise Than Being xlii Pandey, Gyan 133 Partition xviii, xx, xxx, 117, 133 Patel, Sardar xx paternalism xx–xxi patriotism xxiv, xxvi, 86 Pawar, Daya 26, 50–1 Pawar, Urmila xxxvii, xxxix, 26, 28–40, 42–56, 58, 60–1, 146 childhood of 53 encouragement of mother 54 memoir 28, 32, 47 Pinto, Jerry xxxv poverty 3–4, 8–10, 16, 18, 20, 24, 46, 136, 145, 153 power xviii, xxi–xxii, 19, 22–3, 25, 28, 50, 53, 88, 92, 101, 118, 122, 140, 142 of dissociation 66 of ethical action xvi

Index

Prabhu, Gayathri xxxv Prabhakar, Vishnu 93–4 Premchand, Munshi 61, 99, 145 Prisoner No. 100. See Habib, Anjum Prisons We Broke, The. See Kamble, Baby progressivism 86 Quilt, The 61 rage 43, 51, 100, 112, 114, 135–6, 140, 153 Rajagopal, Arvind 10 Ranjan, Sudhanshu 147 representation xvii, xix, 28, 65, 145, 150, 152 of desires 45 of mourning and healing 35 muted xxv technical minority xix visual media 19 Ricoeur, Paul xiii, 144 rituals xxiv, 3, 6, 13, 30–1, 33–4, 43, 140, 146, 152 sacrifice 4, 12, 55, 81, 113 Saksena, Shiban Lal xviii Sandhu, Amandeep xxxv sankhya xlii Sartre, Jean-Paul 101 Savarkar, V. D. xxii Sawhney, Simona xxxvi Scheduled Caste xix, 51, 53, 152

169

Scheduled Tribes xix schizophrenia xxxiii Schmidt, Michael 115 Schurmann, Reiner 49 selfhood xx, xxix, xxxvi, 47, 54, 58, 64, 129 Sen, Avirook 5 Seshadri, Vijay 27 Sethi, Manisha xxvii sexual anxiety 39 desires 40 encounter 14 openness 21 violence xxxiv, 14 sexuality xix, xxxv, 8, 21, 40–1, 73, 120, 145 Habib on xxxv Shaikh, Malika Amar 44 Shekhar x, xxii, xxvii, xxxix–xl, 56, 59, 60–6, 70–2, 76, 79–81, 83, 85, 87, 96, 114 Shashi in 77–8, 80–5, 87 Shekhar in xxi, xl, 60, 64, 66–77, 79–87 Shekhar, Hansda Sowvendra xxi Singh, Bhagat xxii, xxvi Sobti, Krishna xxxvii, xl, xli, 114, 116–18, 120–5, 127, 129–34, 137, 141 social shame xl, 3, 50, 87, 90, 92–5, 98–101, 108–9, 111–12, 114, 123, 136, 146, 149, 153 solipsism 80

170

Index

solitariness xl, 29, 50, 71–2, 89 Srikanta x, xl, 87, 89, 91–5, 99, 100, 109, 111–14, 130 Annada Didi in 91–2, 96–8, 100, 106–7 desire in 102 Gahar in 91–3, 104–7 Indra in 94–8, 100, 102, 107 Kamal Lata in 92–3, 108 Pyari Bai/Rajlakshmi in 98–101, 103–9, 111–12 Srikanta in xl, 89–110, 112 storytelling humorous style of 33 literary 50 subjectivation xxxvi, 28, 87–8, 116 substance abuse 44, 53 suicide 34–7, 42, 105, 119, 136, 145–7, 153 of writing 146 Sunflowers in the Dark xl, 120, 123–7, 129–32 Ratika in 125–30 Surendranath, Anup 5 Surlakar, Mandar, case of 37–8 Tagore, Rabindranath xxxvii, 92, 109, 139 To Hell with You, Mitro xl, 120–6, 129–30, 132 childlessness in 123–4, 126 Phoolavanti in 123 sexuality in 120

Totality and Infinity xlii travel 91, 93, 102 Untouchability Ambedkar on xvi in Chalisgaon xv untouchables xiv, xix, 74 upper-caste monopoly 74 Urdu xxviii Valliappan, Reshma xxx–xxxv, xxxviii Vanita, Ruth 131 Velleman, David 27 violence 13, 18, 46, 69, 87, 133, 136 of Partition xviii visual media 19, 26 vulnerability xviii, xxxi, 4, 45, 129, 143, 148 Waiting for a Visa xiii, xix, xxv, xxix Wakankar, Milind xxxvi, 46 Weave of my life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs xxxix, 28–9, 33 Weil, Simone xxiv women’s movement 52 yoga xlii Zindaginama 130